


Reminiscence

by sunflowerseedsandscience



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Post-Revival, The X-Files Revival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-16
Updated: 2017-01-24
Packaged: 2018-09-17 22:54:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 25,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9349850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunflowerseedsandscience/pseuds/sunflowerseedsandscience
Summary: Mulder wakes one morning to find that Scully has disappeared, and is told- by those he trusts- that she has been dead for over twenty years.  All of the evidence- and even Mulder’s own memories- seem to back it up.  But is it true?  Or can Mulder not trust anyone- himself included?This fic was prompted by an awesome video by the amazing Kelly (user @mulderswaterbed on tumblr), which you can watchhere.





	1. Chapter 1

In his dreams, there are flashing lights, loud noises, the high, keening sound of the wind, and, he could swear, someone calling his name in a panic... though it could have just been more wind. He wakes once, barely, just enough to register that it's storming outside, raining instead of snowing because it's been a warm winter.

When he wakes for the day, hours later, her side of the bed is cold, empty, the covers pulled up to the pillow and tightly tucked in. He tries to think back to the conversation they'd had before bed- had she said anything about leaving early? He could have sworn they'd decided to drive to work together today. He retrieves his smartphone from the nightstand, but there are no new texts, no missed phone calls. He rolls onto his back with a groan, staring up at the badly cracked ceiling that he's been meaning to re-plaster for years.

He tells himself that maybe she'd discovered, upon waking, that she'd forgotten something important at her apartment back in DC, and she hadn't wanted to wake him up when she'd realized she'd have to go home before heading to the Hoover building. Or maybe she'd discovered that he'd run out of coffee earlier this week, and she's making a quick Starbucks run so that she doesn't have to begin the day sans caffeine.

Maybe she's on her way back here, even now.

But when seven-thirty has come and gone, and Mulder has showered, shaved, and donned his suit for the day, and there's still no sign of Scully, he has to conclude that, whatever the reason, she must have decided to leave the house before he'd woken up.

Without telling him.

Mulder tries to remember if there's anything he might have said, at work or after, the previous evening, that could have offended her, could have made her decide to leave in the middle of the night... but, oddly enough, he's having a hard time remembering anything that happened at work at all, and nothing from when they'd arrived back at the house. He remembers her sitting across from him at the desk in their office, frowning down at something- a report?- and pushing a lock of long hair out of her face, rolling her eyes at something ridiculous he'd said.

Wait.

 _Long_ hair?

He shakes his head sharply. He must not be getting enough sleep, if his brain is _this_ scrambled.

At seven-forty-five, with his tie done up and his briefcase packed, Mulder concludes that he can't wait any longer to see if Scully is coming back before work. Just to be safe, he pulls his phone out of his pocket, holds down the home key, and instructs it: "Call Scully." 

An electronic chime, a beat, and then the infuriatingly unhelpful digital voice states, "I don't see 'Scully' in your contacts. Should I look for a location by that name?" Mulder swears and fully unlocks the phone, goes to his contact list, and scrolls down, to find...

...nothing.

There's "Scully, Margaret," because he's felt an awful pang every time he's gone to delete Maggie's number (and it's only been a couple of weeks, anyway), but no "Scully, Dana." Swearing again, he switches to the keypad and enters her number from memory.

"The number you have reached is not a working number. Please hang up and try again." He frowns at his phone, completely mystified now. Has he mis-typed it? No, there it is, clear as day. What the hell?

One way or another, he's got an hour's drive to get to work, and he needs to leave now. Whatever's going on, he'll get to the office, see Scully, and get it sorted out. Knowing his luck, his phone's malfunctioning again. He's never quite gotten the hang of operating these things; he'd liked it much better when all he'd had to do to get connected to his entire world had been to hold down the "1" key and wait for her to pick up.

 

\------------------------

 

Mulder's beat-up pickup truck pulls into the parking garage five minutes after nine o'clock. He'd made a stop for coffee, both one for him and one for Scully, and had needed to step out of the line for several minutes because, suddenly, he couldn't remember how she takes it. Black? He didn't think that was right. Cream and sugar? Nonfat milk, no sugar? That last had sounded the most likely, so he'd gone with that. But to forget his partner's coffee order after twenty-four years... something is clearly wrong in his head this morning.

The office is locked and dark when he reaches it, and his sense of unease deepens further. Scully is _always_ on time. Has been as long as he's known her. 

With worry over Scully forming a tight ball in the pit of his stomach, Mulder fires up the computer and checks his e-mail. Nothing out of the ordinary is waiting for him- Agent Miller has sent him an article on cryptids that he'd found interesting, as he's done a number of times since their meeting after the bombing in Texas, and there's the usual warning from the system administrator that his inbox is over its capacity, advising that he needs to delete older messages. He gets the same notice at least once a month; he's terrible at cleaning out his e-mails. Normally Scully has to remind him to do it.

Scully.

He frowns to himself. It's already nine-thirty and she's still not here. He glances at his phone again, but there's nothing. On the exceedingly rare occasions she's been late or taken a sick day before, she's always called, once to him and once to Skinner, to let them both know ahead of time. He tries her number again, but gets the same non-working number message. He opens his texts, preparing to ask her if she's okay (even though she won't so much as look at it if she's on the road- no matter what sounds her phone makes, if she's driving, it remains in her purse, on the floor), but is further confused when his entire text conversation with her is nowhere to be found.

He nearly hurls the phone against the wall. What is going _on_ with this thing? What else has it randomly decided to delete? Mulder has other important things on here, saved e-mails and bookmarked websites, documents he's forwarded from the office so that he can have them on hand whenever he needs them, and if his phone is going to suddenly start losing information, it's going to be a problem.

Mulder enters Scully's number manually, and types, "Where are you? Everything okay?" into the window. After a moment's hesitation, he adds a little worried face (or at least, he _thinks_ it's a worried face; emojis are a foreign language to him), hoping to keep the tone light. He doesn't want her to think he's obsessing, freaking out and jumping to the worst possible conclusion, when there's probably a perfectly rational explanation for all of this.

Seconds after he sends the text, it bounces back, with a message: "Error: not delivered."

It must be the phone. Clearly, he needs a new one. He reaches for the office phone sitting on the corner of his desk, gets an outside line, and dials Scully's number.

"The number you have reached is not a working number. Please hang up and-"

He slams the phone down.

What the _hell_ is going on?

Mulder glances up at the clock again. Nine-forty-five. _Screw it,_ he thinks to himself, standing abruptly and grabbing his overcoat. He's driving over to her apartment. If nothing is wrong, if she's just late and hasn't called, or she's taking a sick day, she's going to be annoyed with him for overreacting... but he'd rather risk her wrath than have something really be wrong, have her needing his help, and not be around to provide it.

He's prepared to throw a half-baked excuse at Skinner, or anyone else he might run into on his way out to his truck, but no one takes any notice of him. He manages to stay reasonably close to the speed limit, and to his great relief, there's a parking space big enough for his truck readily available right in the front of her building. He kills the engine, leaps out, and jogs up her front steps. Someone is exiting the building as he's entering, and he manages to catch the door before it swings shut, eliminating the need to have her buzz him in- as well as the need to use the keys that, he realizes, he's left in his briefcase at work.

The elevator is on another floor, and rather than wait for it, Mulder jogs up to the third floor and down the hall, stopping at Scully's door. He raps sharply, but for a moment, there's no answer. His heart in his throat, he knocks again. "Scully, it's me," he calls. "Open up, okay?" There's still no answer. Could she be in there, injured? Fell in the shower this morning, maybe? He pounds on the door again, aware that he's probably disturbing her neighbors. "Come on, Scully, open the door!"

He's just turning away, deciding to find the super and flash his badge to get him to open the door, when there's the clunk of locks turning, the rattle of the chain being removed, the creak of the door opening. "Thank God," says Mulder, turning back. "I was just about to-" His words freeze in his throat.

It's not Scully.

Standing in the doorway, looking completely bewildered (and not a little afraid), is an elderly woman Mulder's never seen before.

"Can I help you?" she asks, not opening the door all the way.

"I... I'm sorry," Mulder stammers. "I must have the wrong...." He glances back at the number on the door. No, this is definitely Scully's apartment. "Are you a relative of Dana's?" Maybe the woman is an aunt who's dropped in for a surprise visit, and that's what's keeping Scully. But no, the woman looks politely confused.

"Who?"

"Dana Scully," Mulder says insistently. "The woman who lives here."

"I think you have the wrong apartment," the elderly woman says, and begins to close the door. Mulder throws out an arm to stop her.

"No, please, I know I have the right address!" he insists. "I'm looking for my partner, Dana Scully. She's lived here for the past year and a half, and she didn't show up to work today, and I'm trying to-"

"I've lived here for the past four years, young man," says the woman, pushing the door against Mulder's arm. "Please leave, or I'll have to call the police." Mulder withdraws his arm, reluctantly, and the woman slams the door. He hears the locks falling back into place, and he steps back, pacing up and down the hallway, completely at a loss. What had started out as unease is quickly descending into full-blown terror.

Scully is missing. He has no idea where she is. And someone else is living in her apartment.

Mulder's head is spinning. He feels sick. He races back down to the lobby and out the front doors, hoping that the cold February air will shock him back to sanity and make everything make sense again... but all he feels is a rising sense of panic.

 _Skinner_ , he thinks to himself, racing to his truck and jumping in. He has to find Skinner and tell him what's going on. If something has happened to Scully, Skinner will want to get to the bottom of it as quickly as possible. He'll throw the full resources of the Bureau into it, Mulder knows he will.

Skinner will help him figure it out.

 

\-------------------------

 

Skinner's assistant (Kimberly left ages ago and Mulder can never remember her replacement's name) isn't at her desk, so Mulder goes straight to the office door and pounds on it.

"Come in," calls a gruff voice from within, and Mulder throws open the door and races in. The Deputy Director is seated at his desk.

"Sir," he says. "There's a problem." Skinner frowns.

"What is it, Agent Mulder?"

"Scully's missing," he says, struggling to keep the panic out of his voice. "She was at the house last night when I went to sleep, but she was gone when I woke up this morning." He can't read the expression on Skinner's face at all, but it's not a good one. He's not sure why the idea of Scully being with him last night would be upsetting; hadn't they lived together for years before she'd moved out? They have a son together, for Christ's sake. Now is not the time for Skinner to suddenly have a problem with all of this. Mulder forges ahead. "I thought maybe she'd just left early to get ready for work at home, but she never showed up this morning. Never called or anything. I couldn't get through to her on her cell phone, so I drove out to her apartment, and...." He shakes his head, still unable to make sense of the morning's events. "There's a woman there, in her apartment, a total stranger, and she says _she's_ been living there for four years." Skinner is still silent, still looking at him with that unreadable- but frightening- expression. "Something's happened, Sir. She's in trouble. I can feel it. We have to-"

"Agent Mulder," Skinner interrupts, his voice icy cold, "is this some sort of sick joke?" Mulder's mouth drops open.

"A joke? Sir, I don't-"

"Because if it is," Skinner continues, standing slowly, "I assure you, it is in _very_ poor taste." Now Mulder understands: Skinner thinks he and Scully are pranking him, pretending something's happened to her in order to rile him up. And Mulder has to agree that if that were what he's trying to do, it _would_ be in poor taste. Scully's gone missing before, after all.

"No, Sir, I promise," says Mulder urgently. "It's not a joke. I would _never_ joke about something like that. Scully's missing and we need to find her before something-"

"Agent Mulder," says Skinner, walking out from behind his desk, exuding a cold fury Mulder hasn't felt directed at him in over twenty years, "Dana Scully was shot and killed twenty-three years ago in 1994."

The world around Mulder spins alarmingly. He reels back as though Skinner's words have literally struck him. Staggering slightly to the side, his hand comes to rest on the arm of one of the two chairs sitting in front of Skinner's desk, and he looks down at it, uncomprehending.

And suddenly, Mulder is assaulted with a memory. Distant, hazy, but still there. Skinner's old office, when he'd been assistant director, their boss for less than a year. Mulder closes his eyes as the images flash before him.

A much younger Skinner, sitting in the other chair, hanging his head. His hand on Mulder's shoulder... because Mulder is sobbing, his entire body shaking. His suit jacket has been lost somewhere along the way, and his dress shirt is covered in blood. Blood that's not his. His chest is aching, is heart is completely broken and shattered, because Scully is... Scully is....

_No._

Mulder shakes his head, and the image dissolves. Skinner is standing in front of him, looking more concerned now than angry.

"Agent Mulder?" His voice is cautious, worried. "What's going on?" But Mulder scarcely hears him. Skinner reaches out to clasp Mulder's arm, but he rips away, turning and tearing out of Skinner's office.

Just like at Scully's apartment building, he foregoes the elevator and flies down the stairs, not stopping until he reaches the basement. He pounds along the hallway, digging his keys out of his pocket as he goes... but when he reaches the office door, he finds it standing open, the lights on. He catches his breath. Is she here? No, the office is empty. Maybe Skinner had come down earlier, looking for him.

Mulder dashes to the file cabinet in the corner and jerks open the bottom drawer. Everything prior to 1998 had been lost in the fire, but he and Scully have spent years retrieving backup copies from every possible source. And the one he's searching for had been so important, had touched so many different divisions and individuals, that getting their hands on another copy had been no problem at all.

It's filed in the S's, under "Scully, Dana." Initially, it had been in the B's, under "Barry, Duane," but later, after the episode with Jerse, after her cancer, after Emily, and Ruskin Dam, Mulder had consolidated everything into one file so that Scully would not constantly be stumbling over her own history, no matter which drawer she opened.

Even as he seizes the file in his hands and rips it out of the drawer, he knows something is wrong. The file is much, much too thin. He flips it open, and the first thing he sees is that hated photograph, the enlarged, pixelated, black-and-white picture of Scully stuffed into the trunk of a car, staring up in abject terror at her captor. He shoves it to the side, unwilling to look at it for a second longer than he has to. Underneath is a typed-up report, one whose opening paragraphs he recognizes, and he pulls it out.

The beginning is familiar enough: Agent Dana Scully was abducted from her apartment by Duane Barry following his escape from the hospital earlier that same night. She had been in the process of leaving a message for Mulder at the time, and her abduction had been recorded on his answering machine. Lifting the report slightly, he can see a copy of the tape resting underneath. Barry had come back on the FBI's radar after killing a police officer who had stopped him, and camera footage had captured Scully in the trunk of Barry's car. Mulder had deduced- correctly- that Barry had been taking Scully to Skyland Mountain, scene of his own earlier abduction, and had raced there to try and intercept him.

But here, the written account diverges from what Mulder remembers.

In Mulder's memory, he had arrived scant moments too late and had found Duane Barry shrieking his victory to an empty sky, with Scully nowhere to be found. He had taken Barry into custody, where the man had eventually died.

In the report, Mulder had come on the scene and had found Barry waiting for him, Scully clutched in front of him, a gun held to her temple. Mulder had tried to talk to Barry, to calm him down...

...and suddenly, it's happening again, just like in Skinner's office, moments ago. The memory is foggy and distorted... but he can _see_ Duane Barry, standing in the hilltop clearing, his face wild and deranged. Scully stands before him, bound and gagged, a livid bruise on her cheek and tears in her terrified eyes. Mulder tries to keep his voice calm, soothing, but it's hard, _so_ hard, with his partner standing there, looking as though Barry's arm around her chest is all that's holding her up.

He says something wrong.

Mulder doesn't know what it is that sets Barry off. All he knows is that the gun in Barry's hand fires, there's the bright flash of the muzzle, and Scully slumps. Barry releases her and she falls ungracefully to the ground, and less than a second later Barry, too, falls, as Mulder shoots him straight through the forehead.

Mulder sees all of this in his mind, but he does not believe it. He _can't_ believe it. That's _not_ how it happened.

But there, at the bottom of the report, is his signature. He wrote this. He signed it. He tucked it into this file, with....

"Oh, Jesus," Mulder moans to himself, as he looks into the bottom of the file. They would have given Scully's personal effects to her family, of course, but this, this they could not have given back, because technically, it's the property of the FBI.

From under all of the papers, Mulder withdraws a slim, leather case, and opens it.

Scully's FBI badge. Her identification. Her young, earnest face, just as it had looked when she had shaken his hand in 1993.

Mulder lurches across the office, falling to his knees in front of the trash can next to his desk and vomiting into it. He feels too weak to stand, and breathing through the pain constricting his chest feels almost impossible. He’s barely aware of the sound of high heels clicking down the hallway outside, barely cognizant that someone is standing in the office doorway, until they speak.

“Fox?”

There are very few things that could penetrate the state of shock that Mulder is in… but this voice is definitely one of them. Because he hasn’t heard this voice since 1999. He jerks to his feet and staggers back, against the wall. He shouldn’t be hearing this voice. He _can’t_ be hearing it, because its owner is-

But she’s not dead. She’s standing in the office doorway, looking at him with concern and worry in her eyes.

“Fox,” says Diana Fowley, “what on _earth_ is going on?”


	2. Chapter 2

Mulder backs across the office until he's flat agains the wall, staring in total horror at Diana, who is looking at him with an almost equal degree of fright. He shakes his head mechanically, words failing him, as Diana advances cautiously, her face full of concern.

"Skinner called me," she says, keeping her voice low, soothing. "He says you ran into his office yelling something about Agent Scully. Fox, are you all right?"

"You... you can't be here," Mulder says, his voice barely a gasp in his throat. "You're not real." Diana's frown deepens. "You're _dead_ , Diana." Diana's mouth drops open and her eyes go wide.

"Fox," she says, "what are you talking about?"

"You died," Mulder insists, flattening himself further against the wall as she comes towards him. "You were shot... in your apartment... because you saved me, because you gave Scully your keycard so she could rescue me." Mulder's legs begin to give out, and he slides down the wall until he's sitting on the floor. Diana reaches him and crouches down in front of him. She reaches out a hand to touch his forehead, and for a split second, the touch is familiar, comforting... until Mulder remembers, with a violent shudder, that it's coming from someone who's been dead for nearly twenty years.

It's _Scully_ who touches him like that in times of distress, _Scully_ who comforts him. He can see her in his mind, bending over him a hundred times, her long, dark hair swinging into her face, her dark blue eyes worried...

 _NO._ That's not what Scully looks like. Scully's hair is short, and... and....

He jerks away and stumbles to his feet, staggering over to the desk and collapsing into the chair behind it. Diana, wisely, does not try to approach him again. Staring at her from a distance, with the protective buffer of the desk between them, he begins to notice things that had escaped him in the sudden shock of seeing her. She's older, clearly older, than he remembers her being. Her face is deeply lined, laugh lines and frown lines taking an equal share, and though her hair is still in the same long style she's always worn, she's allowed some grey to creep in among the black. And she's thinner, too.

"Fox," she says, keeping her voice calm, as though she expects him to completely unravel at any moment (which, he thinks, might not be outside the realm of possibility), "did someone tell you that I died? To scare you, maybe?" He shakes his head.

" _Scully_ told me," he insists doggedly. "She came to my apartment... in Hegel Place... and she told me they'd found your body, and I... and I told _her_...." He pauses, his mind groping. It had been an important conversation, he knows it was, and he knows that whatever he'd said to her, it had shifted everything between them, once and for all... but the words escape him. He closes his eyes and clutches his face in his hands.

He remembers the feel of her kissing his forehead tenderly, the softness cutting through the aching pain that had suffused his head for days. Her thumbs on his lips, the urge to kiss her nearly overpowering, held in check only by the knowledge that she wasn't quite ready, that she was still too emotional after saving him from... what? What had happened to him?

"Hegel Place?" Diana asks, frowning. "Why would you be back there? Fox, you haven't lived there since your mother died and you bought your farmhouse."

" _Scully_ and I bought the farmhouse," Mulder protests weakly. "We bought it together. In 2005, when we came back."

"Back?" Diana slowly approaches the other side of the desk, looking more worried by the second. "Fox, you haven't gone anywhere. You've been in this office for almost thirty years now. _I'll_ have been here for twenty years, come June." She smiles tentatively at him. "Don't you remember last week? Joking that we should go out, that we should celebrate working together for twenty years without either of us killing the other?" Mulder shakes his head.

"You left," he insists. "You went to Europe. You _left_."

"And I came back," she says gently. "I finished my assignment, I came home, and I heard you weren't handling things well in the years since you'd lost your partner... and I came back." She places her hands on the desk in front of her, and Mulder spies a diamond sparkling on her wedding ring finger. Not a tiny chip like the one he'd given her during their extremely brief, long-since-annulled marriage, but a good-sized solitaire, two carats at least. With a brand new twinge of terror in his gut, he looks at his own hand- but there's no ring there, not even so much as a pale band of skin suggesting that one normally rests there. He relaxes slightly.

There's a noise out in the hallway, the muted _ding_ of the elevator, followed by heavy footsteps, and Walter Skinner appears in the doorway. He doesn't look angry, not anymore; instead, he stares at Mulder with undisguised worry before turning to Diana. His face registers absolutely no concern at the sight of a woman who was supposedly shot to death two decades ago standing there, completely alive, looking back at him with raised eyebrows.

"Agent Fowley," Skinner says, "may I speak to you out here for a moment?"

"Of course, Sir," Diana replies, and she follows Skinner out into the hallway, closing the door behind her.

In her absence, Mulder gazes around the office, beginning to notice things that had escaped him before. The table where Scully usually sits, when they're not sharing space at the desk, is much more disorganized than he remembers, stacks of papers leaning haphazardly against one another, a stack of books piled in the corner where, just yesterday, Scully had kept a potted violet he'd given her. Next to the books are two framed photographs, and Mulder stands up, approaching the table to examine them. One is of Diana and a handsome man with salt-and-pepper hair and dark eyes, standing together in front of the ocean, their arms around one another, smiling happily. 

The other is clearly a school photograph, a senior portrait. It shows a lovely raven-haired girl, with wide-set eyes the same dark blue as Diana's, grinning brashly into the camera as she holds her mortarboard in front of her chest. An embossing in the bottom left-hand corner of the photograph reads "Rachel, Class of 2016."

On impulse, Mulder whirls around to examine the bulletin board behind the desk. The "I Want to Believe" poster retains its proper place, and it's still surrounded by articles sent to him by his many, many sources... but something is missing. He steps closer... and then he sees it. Tucked into the right-hand corner of the bulletin board, almost obscured by newspaper clippings and post-its, is a four-by-six photograph that's lived in this office since almost the beginning. Drawing the papers covering it aside, he reveals the old crime scene photograph of him and Scully, the one that had been taken near the end of their first year together. It had run beside a newspaper article of a murder they had solved together, and Mulder had contacted the paper, on a whim, to obtain a copy. 

Red hair. Scully has red hair. Short, red hair. In his mind, he can finally see her again, as though a veil has been lifted... but only as she'd looked in this picture, in 1993. When he tries to picture older Scully, the Scully who lives with him in the country farmhouse, it's like trying to peer through soaped glass, through a dense fog.

Mulder gives his head a shake and allows the notes and clippings to cover the photograph again... then, thinking better of it, he removes the thumbtack that's holding it in place. He slides the photo into his coat pocket, and steps cautiously towards the door, listening intently.

Diana and Skinner don't seem to be standing right on the other side, so he eases it open, just a crack, just until he can hear their voices. They're standing around the corner, in the opposite direction from the elevator and stairwell. Mulder strains to hear what they're saying.

"...like he has no idea about anything that's happened in the past twenty-five years," he hears Diana saying. "The look on his face when I walked into the office... Walter, I honestly think he'd convinced himself that I was dead, somehow. Somewhere between leaving the office last night and waking up this morning, he's had a complete mental breakdown."

"Didn't Agent Scully's mother just pass away?" Skinner asks. "I remember him saying something about going to the funeral a couple weeks ago. I know he kept in touch with her... could her dying have... I don't know, triggered something? Some kind of a flashback? God knows he was enough of a mess when Scully was killed. Could her mother dying have brought it back, somehow?"

"I don't know," says Diana. "He seemed fine at the funeral...."

Mulder begins to tune them both out as another idea occurs to him. Scully's mother. Maggie. If Scully has decided, for some insane reason, that she needs to hide out, needs to disappear... could she be at her mother's house? The house has been standing empty since Maggie's passing, though Mulder knows Scully's been spending nights there every now and then, for comfort's sake. Could she be there now? Is this all some crazy, convoluted plot she's come up with, because she needs some space from him?

It doesn't explain Diana, and in his heart, Mulder knows he's grasping at straws, but it's all he's got to go on. Grabbing his briefcase from next to his desk, he throws on his coat. He opens the door slowly, listening just enough to make sure that Diana and Skinner are still around the corner and don't hear him. He creeps down the hallway and into the stairwell, closing the door soundlessly behind him, and then turns, running up the stairs, back to his waiting truck.

 

\----------------------

 

There's an unfamiliar vehicle parked in Maggie Scully's driveway, and Mulder experiences a brief flare of hope in his chest. A rental, maybe? Something she's picked up to throw him off her trail? When he walks up the driveway and gets closer, he sees that there is, in fact, a rental sticker in the back window of the car, and his heart leaps. He practically runs up the front walk, and he just barely manages to knock calmly on the front door instead of pounding on it and screaming her name.

He knows something is wrong almost immediately. There are footsteps on the other side of the door... but it's a heavy tread, a man's tread. It's not Scully. The lock is turned, the door is opened... and Mulder is face-to-face with Bill Scully, Junior, for only the second time in over ten years.

He's avoided Bill ever since a disastrous Christmas Day in 2005, when he and Scully, having just bought the run-down farmhouse, had decided it had been safe for them to go to Maggie's house so that Scully could see her brothers for the first time in three years. Bill had strode up to Mulder the moment he'd crossed the threshold and had wordlessly punched him in the face. And the day had gotten no better from there. After that, for all holiday celebrations that Bill had attended, Mulder had stayed home.

So Mulder is, understandably, nervous... but Bill doesn't look the slightest bit angry. His forehead is creased in polite confusion, it's true, but he's certainly wearing a far kinder expression than Mulder has ever seen on him before.

"Agent Mulder," says Bill, hesitantly, "right?" He extends a hand. Mulder's seems to come up automatically to shake it. "I saw you at the funeral. I'm sorry I didn't come over to say hello." Hadn't he? Mulder struggles to remember Maggie's funeral. The only image that comes to him is he and Scully, alone on the shore of an inlet, an urn at their feet, discussing... Maggie? Bill? He can't remember, and he feels panic rising in his gorge yet again. Bill steps back, pushing the door open. "Come in, please," he says, and Mulder wills his feet to move.

Inside, everything looks the same as Mulder remembers it, with one exception: the photographs on the mantlepiece are slightly different. Scully is there... but only as a child and, in a very few photos, as a twenty-something young woman. Nothing of her in her thirties, or in her forties, and nothing of her with Mulder. He feels as though someone else is missing from the photographs, as well, but he can't figure out who it is.

"I suppose you've come for your things?" Bill asks, coming up behind Mulder as he examines the photos. Mulder turns, frowning.

"My things?" he asks, and there's that bit of hope again.

"Yeah, Mom had a little box of stuff set aside with your name written on it," Bill says.

"Bill, who is it?" calls a voice from the kitchen, and a moment later, Tara Scully appears. She frowns at Mulder without a hint of recognition.

"Honey, you remember Mr. Mulder, don't you?" Bill asks. "Dana's old FBI partner. He's here for the things Mom left for him." Tara's face relaxes into a smile, and she comes forward and takes Mulder's hand.

"Of course," she says. "Maggie talked about you all the time. It meant so much to her that you stayed in touch, after...." Her voice trails off sadly. Bill disappears into the kitchen and returns with a small cardboard box. Mulder's name- first and last- is printed across the top in Maggie Scully's handwriting.

"We've been cleaning out the house all week," says Bill, "and we found this in Mom's closet. We were going to call you to come and pick it up, but it looks like you've saved us the trouble." Thoroughly mystified, Mulder places the box on the coffee table and opens it, completely unsure of what to expect.

There's not much inside. An empty holster that looks very much like the one Scully had worn when they'd first begun working together. A novelty coffee mug in the shape of a green alien's head that Scully had given him that first Christmas ("I know it should be grey, but I'm too lazy to paint it," the card had read, and he'd laughed). A small sheaf of polaroids, half of him, half of her, both of them making silly faces for the camera, when they'd gotten bored on one of their first stakeouts. An empty root beer bottle that had, he thinks he remembers, held flowers every now and then, first in the office, and later in the house. Scully's diary from 1993 through 1994.

Every item in this box has two things in common: they're all things Scully had had in her possession the first year she'd worked with him... and every single item should, by rights, be back at the house right now, not packed in a box in Maggie's bedroom closet. Mulder begins to feel sick again. 

Tucked into the corner, hidden under the polaroids, is a little velvet jewelry box. Mulder picks it up, somehow knowing what will be inside... but even knowing, it still drives him to his knees.

Scully's cross.

Mulder is dimly aware of both Bill and Tara, concerned, asking him if he's all right, but he can't answer them. If he opens his mouth, he'll be sick. The room is suddenly oppressively hot, and he staggers to the door, desperately needing the February chill on his face.

Outside, a taxi cab is just pulling up to the curb, and Diana Fowley is climbing out of the back seat. "Fox," she calls, running across the lawn. "Are you all right?" He stumbles and nearly falls, but she catches him just in time.

"What's wrong with him?" he hears Bill asking, and looking back, he sees both Bill and Tara standing in the doorway, looking extremely worried. That, more than anything else, cements it for Mulder: Bill could _never_ muster this much concern for him, not in a million years, no matter what his sister could have tried to bribe him with. It's not an act. Scully is not in hiding somewhere; she has not orchestrated any of this to get away from him.

"Come on, Fox," says Diana, escorting him to his pickup truck. "Give me your keys. I'm driving you home."

 

\-----------------------

 

Mulder does not speak for the entire drive from Maggie Scully's house, and Diana does not press him. She doesn't ask for directions, either; she merely steers them through the darkening winter night, finally arriving at the long, gravel driveway up to his house. In the back of his mind, he wonders how she knows how to get here, but there's no answer to that question that he's willing to contemplate. She parks in front of the house, in the same spot he always parks his truck, and turns off the engine, handing him the keys.

"Why don't you try and get some sleep?" she suggests, her voice gentle. "Tomorrow, we can try and figure out what's happened to you. And if we can't...." She looks uncomfortable. "Fox, you might need to talk to someone. I don't know if it's stress, or some sort of reaction to Maggie dying, or... something else... but we need to know, so we can fix it."

"Fix it?" Mulder turns to face her. "I woke up this morning to find out that the love of my life is gone, completely disappeared... and you're here, when that's completely fucking _impossible_ , and you and everybody else want me to believe that I've just fucking _hallucinated_ the last twenty years of my life. How the hell do we fix that?" Diana's face falls.

"The love of your life?" she asks. "Oh, Fox... I know that Walter said that you and Agent Scully were close... and I know you didn't handle her death well, but I always assumed that it was just guilt." She shakes her head. "No wonder. I think that maybe Walter's right, maybe Maggie Scully dying really _has_ triggered something. But we'll figure it out, I promise." Mulder doesn't have the strength to argue. All he wants it to get inside, away from her, because her very presence is wrong. He feels it in every part of his mind. As he's about to climb out of the truck, he has a thought.

"How are you getting home?" he asks. "Cabs don't drive out here."

"I called Stephen," she says, and he stares at her blankly. The name means nothing to him, but then, he remembers the framed photo on her desk, the ring on her finger.

"Your husband," he says, trying not to make it sound like a question.

"Yes," she answers.

"And Rachel is... your daughter." Now Diana looks hurt.

"And your goddaughter, Fox," she says. Mulder shakes his head.

"I need to go," he says, opening the door and climbing out. "I'm sorry, Diana, but I need to be alone." She nods, her lips in a tight line.

Once he's inside, with the door shut, he watches through the window as she gets out of the truck and approaches the house. For a moment, he's worried that she's going to knock, going to ask to wait inside, but she doesn't. She sits on the porch steps until, less than ten minutes later, headlights turn off the main road and approach the house. A dark SUV stops in the driveway, Diana climbs in, and it leaves.

As soon as the taillights disappear down the road, Mulder collapses onto the couch on his back, too drained and exhausted to do anything other than close his eyes and fall into a troubled sleep.

 

\----------------------

 

_The church has completely emptied out around them. Bill and Tara have taken the baby home- who shows up to the funeral of their sister's child with their newborn baby, honestly?- and Maggie has gone with them, with Scully having turned down her mother's offer of a ride._

_"Mulder will drive me back when I'm ready," she'd said, and Mulder had nodded his confirmation._

_The empty casket had been at once, somehow, a total shock, and completely expected. Mulder can't help but feel that Scully has been cheated, yet again, in one final way: she will not have a definite place to go where she can visit her daughter. There seems to be no end to the cruelties inflicted on his partner._

_They exit the church together, Mulder's hand on the small of Scully's back. She blinks in the bright sunlight, the cheerful San Diego weather completely at odds with the sadness of the day. Mulder nods at the cross in Scully's hand._

_"You want me to put that on for you?" he asks, holding out his hand, but she shakes her head._

_"I'm not ready for it just yet," she says. "I just can't-" She closes her eyes tightly against the tears that Mulder wishes she would, just this once, succumb to. He knows she'll feel better if she can just let loose a little, and he'd rather she does it here, when he's around to comfort her, than when she's alone and no one is able to put their arms around her. "I can't quite bring myself to wear it yet," she says, gaining mastery over her emotions again. He nods._

_"All right," he says. Scully looks thoughtful for a moment; then, with a decisive nod, she holds out her hand, placing the cross in his palm and closing his fingers over it._

_"Can you hold it for me?" she asks. "Just... for now. Until I'm ready for it again."_

_"Of course, Scully," he says. He's tempted to put it around his own neck. Not for any religious reasons, not really. He just likes the idea of having something that's touched her resting on his chest._

_When he thinks about it, maybe it_ is _for religious reasons. After all, he's never had as much faith in anyone or anything as he has in Scully._

_Mulder carefully tucks the necklace into the inner pocket of his suit coat. It's the second time he's held her cross for her._

 

\----------------

 

The sound of an unfamiliar ring tone pulls Mulder from his dreams. He fumbles for his phone and pulls it out of his jeans pocket, but the screen is blank- it's not his phone that's ringing. Looking around, he sees a strange phone sitting on the coffee table next to him, the screen lit, announcing an incoming text message from a blocked number. Frowning, he picks the phone up. Is it Diana's? Did she forget it here? No, she hadn't even come inside the house. Mulder taps the screen, opening the text message. It's short and to the point.

"Delta Flight 1428 from Dulles International to Casper, Wyoming. Eleven-forty-five A.M. Tell no one."


	3. Chapter 3

Mulder doesn't know what kind of phone this is, but it's getting perfect reception and he's able to access the internet without wi-fi at thirty thousand feet, so he's betting it's expensive.

Trusting the unknown benefactor who had left the phone, not to mention made him these travel reservations, is a huge risk, he knows, but he can't think of any alternative. The thought of driving back to the Hoover building to argue with a dead woman over the whereabouts of a woman who should most certainly _not_ be dead had not been the slightest bit appealing, and there had only been so much he could do from his house. His work laptop isn't authorized to access most of the FBI's database away from the office, so the research he can do is limited to whatever is publicly available. Mulder has never been much of a hacker. He has people he contacts to do that for him, and right now, none of them are answering his calls.

In the end, using the plane ticket secured by the owner of the mystery phone had been the only way forward that he hadn't been certain would turn out to be a dead end. He had called Skinner and had requested a sick day, which Skinner had been all too willing to grant.

Not long after the first text had arrived, there had been a second, also from a blocked number: "Leave your personal phone and laptop behind. All calls, texts, and e-mails will be forwarded to this device. This condition is for your own safety, and if you do not comply, your plane ticket will be cancelled." He'd been somewhat reluctant to do as the text had said, but in the end, the lure of whatever potential enlightenment awaits him in Wyoming had been too powerful to resist.

And as it turns out, this phone is far more useful to him than any of his personal electronics could possibly have been, because somehow, it's equipped to bypass the FBI's security without absolutely no input or effort from him. During his wait at the airport, and for the first half of his flight, he pulls up every archived report from the X-Files department that he can find. The oldest available look like scanned copies of print-outs, whereas the newer ones are the same standardized online report form every department now uses. Mulder recognizes the newest cases- the bombing in Texas, the bizarre living graffiti in Philadelphia, the lizard-man preparing for his ten thousand year hibernation- but he does not recognize the reports themselves at all. His own contributions are the same, but in the spaces allotted for Scully's half of the report, he sees only Diana's name.

Perhaps the most confusing, the most troubling, are the reports he finds on file from 2002 until 2008- years he knows, beyond a doubt, that he most definitely had not been haunting the basement of the Hoover building. Certainly, he had been a topic of conversation within the FBI for those six years, but as the subject of a manhunt, not as the one writing a report on it. Unlike the rest of the cases he's pulled up from the Bureau's database, he has no memory whatsoever of any of these, in spite of his signature appearing at the bottom of every single report. He can't even form a mental picture of any of them in his head.

Mulder grows more perplexed the longer he reads, until finally, he has a pounding headache and has to give it a rest. Tucking his phone into his pocket, he leans back in his seat and gazes out the window. He's absolutely exhausted. His sleep last night had been troubled, not nearly restorative enough, given the stress he's under right now, and it doesn't take long for his eyelids to begin to droop.

 

\------------------------

 

_The road is an endless blacktop ribbon, leading them through flat, unchanging landscape. Everything around them is dead and brown. The brightest thing, by far, is the vibrant red hair of the woman in the passenger seat... but even that, Mulder reflects sadly, will have to change at some point. Scully's already bought the brown hair dye; it's been sitting in a bag in the backseat for nearly two weeks now. She's confessed that she can't quite bring herself to use it, and even though he knows it's not smart, he can't seem to make himself push the issue._

_She's already given up her whole life for him. Insisting that she change yet another thing about herself, even if it's only temporary, even if it's to help keep them safe, seems cruel._

_Scully sighs and shifts in her seat, turning to gaze at him. He'd thought that maybe she'd been asleep, but her eyes are clear and sharp as they meet his own, though her expression is disturbingly difficult to read. That's what almost a year apart has done to them: where he could once read her entire train of thought in a single arched eyebrow, she's closed off to him now, as though she's a language he's lost fluency in after being away from his home country for too long._

_"We should drive north for awhile," she suggests._

_"Anywhere in particular?" he asks. She shrugs halfheartedly._

_"I don't know," she says. "Somewhere green. I've had enough of the desert." She frowns at the gauges on the dashboard. "Cooler weather could be easier on the car, you know." He has to concede that she's got a point there. They've got cash, it's true, more than enough to afford a replacement car if they need one... but they're limited to private sales, to people who don't ask questions, who won't ask to see a driver's license for a test drive, who won't run their information through a police database or ask to see proof of insurance._

_"What's north of here?" Mulder asks, and Scully snorts._

_"We're in Arizona, Mulder," she says._ "Everything _is north of here." He concedes the point with a nod of his head. "I didn't have anywhere specific in mind," she admits. "I'd just like to see trees again. Colorado, maybe... or Wyoming." She nods decisively. "Yeah, let's go to Wyoming. That's sparsely populated enough, right?"_

 _"I think so," Mulder replies. "I don't know much about it, though. We didn't go there much for cases." He pauses and studies her for a moment. The road is straight and empty, and he can take his eyes away from it without risking a crash. "Is that... is Wyoming where_ he _is?" he asks, hesitantly._

_Her face is immediately closed off._

_"I've told you before, I have no idea where he is," she says, looking back out the window, away from him. "He could still be in DC, for all I know."_

_"They wouldn't do that," says Mulder. "Chance you seeing him on the street? That would be too cruel."_

_"Mulder, I've told you before, I don't want to talk about it," Scully insists, her voice brittle, inches from breaking. And though he knows it would probably help to talk about it, about him- help them both, most likely- he won't pressure her. He can't._

_There's nothing keeping her here with him. She could go home at any time and say that he'd forced her to leave, claim he'd kidnapped her. It's not her that they want, not really._

_He will not, he_ cannot, _do or say anything that will push her away._

_He sighs. "Wyoming it is, then."_

 

\-----------------

 

The sound of the captain announcing their descent to Casper-Natrona County International Airport wakes Mulder with a startle. For a moment, the image of Scully as she'd looked, sitting despondent in the passenger's seat of their beat-up car, still lingers in front of his face, her eyes impossibly blue, impossibly sad, her red hair hanging down across her shoulders.

Then it's gone, and once again, the only image of Scully that he can conjure up in his mind is the fresh-faced new recruit who had laughed with him in a cold Oregon cemetery in the middle of the night. He can picture almost every moment of that first year in perfect clarity... but somewhere around the time he knows she'd been abducted, everything in his mind becomes muddled and uncertain.

When the plane lands, Mulder skips the baggage carousel- his unknown benefactor has booked him on the very first flight back to DC tomorrow, before the sun is even up- and makes for the car rental counter. A text had arrived on his phone just after the plane had touched down, instructing him to rent a car and drive north to Kaycee.

By the time Mulder arrives, it's nearly four in the afternoon. Having no further instructions, he pulls the rental car to the side of the road and waits... and within ten minutes, the phone chimes, announcing another text from a blocked number.

"Go to the Invasion Bar and Cafe on Nolan Avenue. Take a booth facing the door and order a meal." Mulder can't help but grin at the name. He locates the restaurant with ease- the town of Kaycee is too small to get lost in- and sits at a table along the windows in the front, facing the door, as instructed. He orders a cheeseburger and eats it slowly, watching the door, waiting.

Precisely what he's waiting _for_ , he doesn't know.

After about fifteen minutes, Mulder sees a group of teenage boys walking along the road towards the restaurant, backpacks slung over their shoulders. They turn into the parking lot, shoving each other good-naturedly and laughing, and the one in front pulls open the door. They file in, one by one... and as the last boy in line enters the restaurant, Mulder's heart seems to stutter to a stop in his chest.

The boy looks to be about sixteen, relatively tall, with the same lanky, gangly build Mulder had had at that age. His short, curly hair is a gingery red, his complexion is pale, and his rather outsize nose- its shape startlingly familiar to Mulder, who sees the same one in the mirror every day- is dusted with a generous smattering of freckles. Even from across the restaurant, Mulder can make out the blue of the boy's eyes.

Scully's eyes.

And now Mulder knows what he's been brought to Wyoming to see: absolute proof that he is _not_ crazy, the one piece of evidence of Scully's continued existence that whoever has taken her cannot erase, because they don't know where he is.

His son.

 _Their_ son.

William.

The phone in Mulder's pocket suddenly chimes, announcing a new text message, and Mulder jumps a mile. He realizes that he's standing, that he's unconsciously gotten to his feet at the sight of his son, that he is, in fact, halfway out from behind his table. He glances at the phone.

"DO NOT APPROACH HIM," the screen reads. "DO NOT GIVE ANY INDICATION THAT YOU KNOW WHO HE IS. The men who have abducted Scully do not know his location. We don't believe you've been followed, but if you have been, you can't be seen speaking to him."

Mulder sits down so fast that the booth rocks back against the wall with a loud thump. The boys glance in his direction, and he looks down at his food quickly. He can feel their eyes on him for another moment- this is a small enough town that they probably know everyone by sight, and he's a stranger- but then they take a table on the other side of the dining room. They glance at him every now and then, and William's eyes in particular linger on him curiously. He wonders- does the boy know who he is? Scully had told him about William's strange abilities as a child, the way he could make things move without touching him, the way he'd been able to read his mother's emotions so effortlessly.

Is there any chance that William can feel what Mulder is feeling right now?

Mulder can't handle sitting this close to his son without speaking to him, and he's terrified that William will come and begin a conversation himself, and so he shovels down the remainder of his meal as quickly as possible and signals for the check. Throwing some money onto the table, he leaves without a backward glance, climbing into his car and driving away.

Less than a hundred yards down the road, he pulls the car over and stops, taking deep breaths, trying to gain mastery over himself. He can still see the restaurant in his rearview mirror, and he badly wants to wait until the boys come outside, wants to follow William, discretely and at a distance. He wants to know where the boy lives, wants to see the people he's been calling Mom and Dad for the past fifteen years, wants to make sure he's got parents who care about him, a good, strong house to live in, everything he needs.

But if someone is watching him right now....

He can't. He won't. He's going to have to trust that William is okay, trust from the few minutes he's spent observing him that's he's happy, he's healthy, he has friends, and he's growing up safe.

He puts the car in drive and returns to the airport.

 

\-------------------------------

 

There are no further text messages that evening, so Mulder takes a room at the airport Hilton, but finds he's too wound up to sleep. He lies awake, staring up at the stained popcorn ceiling, trying desperately to make sense of the events of the past two days.

Scully is missing. That much is still certain. And wherever she is, Mulder is relatively sure she didn't get there under her own power, and whoever is responsible is going to incredible lengths to make it seem as though she was never there at all.

Up to, and including, bringing someone back from the dead.

Mulder has no idea how Diana fits into this whole mess. He's pretty sure it really _is_ her, though he makes a mental note to check the back of her neck the first chance he gets. He's aware that he never did see her body, that Scully hadn't, either; they'd simply been told she'd been shot, and had believed it. They had attended her funeral together, but the casket had been closed, which had made sense to them, given that she'd been shot in the head.

Scully had never trusted her. That much sticks out in Mulder's mind. And as he thinks about it more, he realizes he can actually access his memories about that period of time, though they're still hazy. It's difficult, but he can picture Scully, her red hair short and sleek, the way she'd started wearing it around the time she'd gotten cancer. He can hear her voice, outlining the concerns she'd had about Mulder's former partner (and former wife, though Scully hadn't been aware of that at the time).

But Diana had redeemed herself. That had been Scully's assertion, not his. She'd enabled Scully to rescue him, and had paid with her life.

Except now it's looking like maybe she hadn't- at least, not by _losing_ her life. Not entirely. It seems plausible enough to Mulder that maybe she's been biding her time, that maybe she's been held in reserve all these years until now. One way or another, he knows he can't trust her.

He can almost picture Scully smiling as he comes to the same conclusion she had, twenty years later. And somehow or other, he can see her face more clearly than he has in days.

 

\-----------------------------------------

 

When Mulder exits the airport in DC the next morning, there's a text message waiting for him.

"Do not return to your house- it's being swept for bugs and mind control devices." Mulder's eyes catch on that phrase. _Mind control?_ He continues reading. "Go directly to your office, but do not use any FBI computers, phones, or other electronics. Do not reveal your whereabouts yesterday to anyone. Do nothing to arouse suspicions. Wait for further instruction." That sounds simple enough, and Mulder doesn't hesitate to comply. He retrieves pickup from long-term parking and drives to the Hoover building.

He's nearly two hours late when he strides into the office, and Diana looks startled to see him.

"I had assumed that maybe you'd decided to take a second day," she says. He shrugs, trying to appear nonchalant, trying not to give anything away.

"A day's rest hasn't made anything make more sense," he says. "I don't see what another day would do."

"Well, don't take your coat off," Diana says, standing and grabbing her own overcoat from the rack. "Skinner suggested that I take you on a little trip today." Mulder frowns.

"Where to?" Diana hesitates, biting her lip as though nervous.

"He thinks that maybe... it might do you some good to visit Agent Scully's grave."

This takes Mulder aback. Somehow, this idea hasn't occurred to him: the thought that whoever has taken Scully might have placed a gravestone somewhere in a further effort to throw him off, to convince him that she's gone. He's not wild about the idea of standing in a cemetery somewhere, looking down at a tombstone with Scully's name on it... but the instructions on his phone are clear: do nothing to arouse suspicion. And he can't think of a valid reason why he would refuse to visit the grave of the partner he's already confessed to Diana that he loves more than anyone alive.

So he nods and follows Diana out of the office.

They drive, in Mulder's pickup (he insists on driving, trying to retain as much control over the situation as he can) to a cemetery near the church in Georgetown that Scully had attended, back when they'd first become partners. There won't be a family plot, he knows: both of Scully's parents had been cremated, and her sister had had some sort of back-to-nature burial in rural Maryland somewhere.

Even though he knows the grave is fake, even though he knows she's not here, Mulder isn't prepared for the sight of the stone bearing Scully's name. He stands stock-still, staring at it, and realizes: it's the same headstone Maggie Scully had ordered when her daughter had been missing, the same one he'd tried to talk her out of, insisting that it was too soon, far too soon to give up on her. He hangs his head, remembering the terror of those months, and the despodency that had followed, waiting for some sign, some indication that she hadn't been lost to him forever.

He's feeling far too many of the same emotions now.

Diana reaches out and puts a hand on his shoulder, but removes it immediately when he goes tense all over. He's not sure what she's waiting for: is she expecting him to cry? To have a meltdown like the one he'd had yesterday? Unsure of how to proceed, he simply stands there, until a gentle rain begins to fall from the grey sky above. Neither of them have brought an umbrella.

"Come on, Fox," says Diana gently, taking his arm and leading him away from the gravesite. They walk slowly away, back to the path that leads to the gate.

Halfway there, they pass a funeral in progress, twenty or so mourners in dark coats standing around an open grave under a collection of black umbrellas. All at once, Diana freezes, staring at them with a face suddenly devoid of color.

"Diana?" asks Mulder. "You okay?" She doesn't respond. "Diana?" He reaches out and touches her shoulder, and she jumps, startled. She stares at him, her dark blue eyes wide.

"I remember," she says, her voice soft. Mulder frowns.

"Remember what?"

"My funeral," she whispers. It takes a moment for the import of what she's just said to sink in, but when it does, Mulder's heart leaps.

"You remember it?" he asks. "You were watching?" She nods slowly.

"It was raining, like today," she says, and Mulder knows she's right: he remembers standing by her grave, crouching slightly to share an umbrella with Scully, a light, misting rain falling around them. "Spender... her drove me to the cemetery in his car, and we watched through binoculars. He said we couldn't risk getting any closer, neither of us could." She takes a few slow steps towards the gathered mourners, and Mulder follows. "I saw you standing there... you still had the bandages around your head... and _she_ was with you." Diana's eyes narrow.

"Who, Diana?" Mulder knows, but he wants her to say it.

"Scully," Diana spits. "You were sharing an umbrella. You had your arm around her shoulders, and she was leaning against you." Diana looks away from the distant funeral, back up at him. "And I _hated_ her, Fox. I could see how much you loved her, how much _more_ you loved her than you'd ever loved me, and I hated her for it." Mulder doesn't bother to contradict her because it is, of course, the truth.

"Why did Spender help you fake your death?" Mulder asks.

"He gave me a choice," says Diana, frowning as though trying to make out something complicated. "I had to disappear, because... because...." She shakes her head sharply. "I can't remember anything else, Fox," she says.

"Try," Mulder implores her, but she only shakes her head again, harder this time.

"I can't," she insists. She glances back at the funeral once more, then back at Mulder, her face full of panic. "I'm sorry, Fox. I need to go."

"Diana, please," Mulder begs. "Scully could be in danger. I need to know what you know!"

"I don't know anything," she insists. "I don't know _what's_ going on. I can't remember anything else. I need to go home, Fox. I need to see my family." And before he can say anything else, Diana turns and runs for the gate. He sees her reach the main road, waving her arm to hail a cab.

In seconds, she's gone.

He stands completely still, baffled by this new development. Is Diana being played, the same way that he is? Or had that sudden resurgence of memory all been a very convincing act? And if so, to what end?

Mulder begins to make his way slowly back to the gate, at a total loss as to what his next move should be. He wants to go home, but he doesn't know if it's safe yet. He could go to the office- Diana won't be there, so he ought to be able to do more looking around, but he's not sure what he'll tell Skinner if he should be asked where Diana's gone and why. He's just decided that going back to the office makes the most sense, when there's a sudden trill from his pocket. His phone has received a new text message.

This time, it's an address of a warehouse on the other side of town, with the straightforward advisement: "Left-hand side door. Come alone."

Mulder doesn't _think_ he's in any sort of danger; whoever's sending him these texts, they've had plenty of opportunities to kill him, starting with the night they'd snuck into his house to leave the phone on his coffee table. Even so, he's glad he's armed as he drives across town, arriving at the warehouse as the sun is going down. He draws his weapon and approaches it slowly, but no one is in sight. The place looks long-since abandoned.

When he stops in front of the side door that the text message had directed him to, he sees a video camera above the door, aimed directly at him. He feels an incredibly strong sense of deja-vu. He's staring at the heavy metal door, wondering whether he's supposed to knock, when there's a loud crackling from a speaker on the wall.

"I don't believe it," crows an all-too-familiar voice. "You're dead for six months, and you still look better than me. You're in your fifties, and you _still_ look better than me. When am I gonna finally get the upper hand?" Mulder's face breaks into the first smile he's worn in days.

"Never gonna happen, Frohike," he says. "Now open this damn door and let me in."


	4. Chapter 4

_"I could definitely get used to this."_

_Her voice is playful and sweet in a way he's never heard before- but, then, he's never seen her like this before, as many times as he's imagined it. She's spooned up against him, cradled against his chest, his face buried in her neck._

 

 _She's also naked, and while he_ has _seen her this way before, it's certainly never been immediately following a bout of sudden, vigorous, and completely unplanned lovemaking._

 

_"Is that your way of saying you're ready to go again?" he asks, kissing a line down the side of her neck. She smiles and turns her head just enough to cover her lips with his. As they kiss, she rolls him over, straddling him, sliding her body along his until her breasts are pressed against him. She stretches both their arms up above their heads, holding them against the mattress, and kisses him long and deep._

 

_"So is that a yes?" he asks, when they come up for air, and she laughs._

 

_"That's an impressively short refraction period you've got there, Mulder," she comments, pressing her bottom against his rapidly-growing erection. He pretends to be offended._

 

_"Pretty impressive for a guy who's pushing forty, you mean?"_

 

_"Pretty impressive for any guy who's no longer in high school," she says, grinning. "Even more impressive when said guy has just gotten off a plane from London and should, by rights, be deep in the throes of jetlag."_

 

 _"I'm deep in the throes of_ some _thing, for sure," Mulder says, clasping her to him and pushing himself up against her. She sits up slightly and laughs indulgently... until he lifts his head just enough to take one pert nipple between his lips, and suddenly, the time for laughter is over._

 

\------------------------

 

At first, when Langly shakes him awake, Mulder keeps his eyes tightly closed, trying desperately to hold onto the image of Scully as she'd looked above him, that very first night together, her head thrown back and her eyes closed in bliss. And it's easier somehow, this time: he can still see her when he finally opens his eyes. He sits up on the beat-up orange-and-brown sofa, looking sleepily up at the mismatched trio in front of him. 

 

After all that's happened in the past three days, he's not entirely convinced they're real.

 

For the most part, they look the same as ever. Frohike's got a little less hair, and what's left is mostly grey, Byers has a touch of silver at his temples that serves only to make him look more dignified, and Langly... Langly has clearly tried to dye his hair at some point, whether from vanity or an effort to disguise himself Mulder doesn't know, but he clearly hasn't kept up with it, because the bottom six inches of his hair is brown, and the top is a mix of blond and silver.

 

"You were dreaming about her, weren't you?" guesses Frohike, as Mulder rubs the sleep out of his eyes.

 

"Yeah," says Mulder. "Every night since she disappeared. This is the first time I've really been able to remember it, though." Frohike nods in approval.

 

"Means the drug's working its way out of your system and you haven't been slipped a second dose while we weren't looking," he says. Mulder frowns.

 

"The drug?'' The previous evening, when he'd arrived at the Gunmen's new lair, there had only been time for them to update him on the hows and whys of their continued existence before forty-eight hours without sleep had caught up to Mulder, and he'd needed to pass out on their couch before they could really get into any of what's been going on. 

 

Crashing on the Gunmen's couch because of lack of sleep while trying to unravel a dark and malicious conspiracy, and dreaming of Scully all night. Some things never change.

 

"The process that's interfering with your memory seems to be a two-pronged attack," says Byers. "Half of it is being cause by a drug that, we believe, was administered to you around the time Scully disappeared, probably while you were sleeping."

 

"Did you have any freaky dreams that night that you can remember?" asks Langly, and Mulder thinks back.

 

"There was a thunderstorm," he says, after awhile. "The lightning woke me up. High winds, too. And I thought...." He frowns. "I thought someone was calling my name." The Gunmen exchange looks. "What?"

 

"There hasn't been any rain for over a week," says Frohike. "Not anywhere around here. Definitely not out at your house." Mulder mulls this over.

 

"So could that have been a side effect of this drug?" he asks, and the Gunmen shrug.

 

"Could be," says Langly. "We don't really know enough about it to be sure. One way or another, we think they injected you with it while you were sleeping."

 

"You think that's why I didn't hear them taking Scully?" Mulder asks. The Gunmen exchange glances again. "What?"

 

"They wouldn't necessarily have to have forced her," says Byers carefully. Mulder feels his overtired body flood with anger at the insinuation

 

"You think...." Mulder struggles to keep his voice level, incensed at the idea. "You think she would have gone with these people _willingly_?"

 

"Think about it, Mulder," says Langly. "Those aren't the only two options. Don't you remember any other time that Scully went somewhere she might not have if she could've made the decision herself?"

 

And then Mulder realizes what they're getting at... and he can't believe the idea hasn't occurred to him before.

 

"The chip," he says. "You think they used the chip to control her."

 

"At least to get her out of the house," says Frohike. "And maybe into her car?" Mulder nods. 

 

"It was gone in the morning when I woke up," he confirms. "I figured she'd just driven home early to get ready for work." He leans against the back of the couch. "So you think that they summoned her somewhere, like at Ruskin Dam?"

 

"It makes sense," says Frohike. "For all we know, they may even have had her give you the injection, just so there wouldn't be any chance of you waking up and seeing them at all." Mulder digests this. He supposes it's perfectly likely that someone could have planted a syringe in Scully's bag, or even somewhere in the house while neither of them had been home. Frohike's right; it does make sense.

 

"So what's the other half of what's being done to me?" he asks. "You said it was a two-pronged attack." In answer, Frohike pulls a small, strange-looking electronic device, a bit like a bug, from his pocket. "What is that?"

 

"This," says Frohike, "is what we retrieved from the inside of your television yesterday. We took another from your FBI-issued laptop, another from your normal cell phone, and another from your home computer."

 

"We're willing to bet there are more in the Hoover building," says Byers, "though we suspect they don't look like this one."

 

"What do they do?" asks Mulder.

 

"You probably already know," says Langly. "You've seen them before, but they weren't this sophisticated." Mulder frowns, thinking back, his memories still stubbornly fuzzy.

 

And then he remembers.

 

Scully, trashing her hotel room and fleeing. Scully, terrified out of her mind, hiding out at her mother's house. Scully, aiming her gun at him.

 

Scully, believing he'd betrayed her, because that had been her deepest fear.

 

"Braddock Heights, Maryland," says Mulder, sinking back against the couch. "The mind-control devices we found in the cable towers."

 

"Bingo," says Langly. "Only these suckers are way more advanced. Technology's moved ahead in twenty years."

 

"The drugs confused your memories, laying the groundwork," says Byers. "And every time you used your laptop, every time you picked up your cell phone, every time you even looked at your computer at work, your memories were being reprogrammed."

 

"You'd probably be in much worse shape if you'd watched any TV over the past couple of days," says Frohike. "Or if we hadn't told you to ditch your phone and laptop at your house and let us take care of them."

 

"Yeah, thanks for the loaner phone," says Mulder. "And thanks for...." Something suddenly occurs to him. "How did you know where William was?" he asks.

 

"We've known for some time," says Byers. "We've been keeping an eye on him, making sure he's safe."

 

"But we _also_ knew that Scully didn't want to know where he was," says Frohike, catching sight of Mulder's expression and jumping in. "For his own safety. She didn't want to be tempted." Mulder knows it's true, but that doesn't make it sting any less.

 

"But now I know," he points out.

 

"Yeah, you do," says Frohike. "We couldn't think of anything else we could show you that would prove to you that the things you thought you were remembering weren't the truth. William was the only concrete proof we knew of that Scully didn't die in 1994. What you do with that information, when this is all over, is up to you." 

 

Mulder turns this over in his mind. Scully didn't want to know in 2002 when they'd taken off together, that much had been certain. And she hadn't wanted to know in 2005 when they'd bought the house... which had been the last time they'd broached the subject for a long, long time.

 

It's a choice he can't make right now, and so he puts it out of his mind with a sharp shake of his head.

 

"Is this what's reprogrammed everyone else?" he asks, holding up the tiny device. "Skinner, Diana, Scully's brother? His wife?"

 

"Looks like it," says Frohike. "We're pretty sure they've all gotten doses of the memory-altering drugs, too. If we can get at their phones and computers somehow, we'll know for sure."

 

"One way or another," says Byers, "it looks as though all did not go quite according to plan for them."

 

"How's that?" asks Mulder. In answer, all three of the Gunmen grin.

 

"You," says Langly. "If everything had worked exactly the way they wanted it to, you would've gotten out of bed and driven to work without a second thought about Scully or where she was."

 

"Why didn't I, then?" Mulder asks. "Why didn't it completely work on me?"

 

"Our best guess is that she's just too big a part of you to just erase with a shot and some electronic gizmos," says Frohike, grinning. If it had worked, you would've accepted Diana, no questions asked, and gone about your business. But instead, according to the bugs we stuck in your office _years_ ago, you freaked out."

 

"Wouldn't you?" grumbles Mulder. "What's _her_ role in all this, anyway?" The smiles fade from their faces immediately.

 

"We don't know," Byers admits. "It's obvious that her death in 1999 was faked, and she seems to be toeing the line, but we don't know if she's had her memories altered like the rest of you... or if she's just reading from a script someone's given her ahead of time."

 

"She had a flashback of some kind," Mulder says, remembering suddenly. "In the cemetery yesterday. There was a funeral... and she suddenly remembered seeing Scully and me at _her_ funeral. She remembered sitting in a car with CGB Spender and watching us through binoculars." The Gunmen exchange glances.

 

"Interesting," says Frohike. "So either she's being used by them and she doesn't even know it... or she knows exactly what's going on, and they're trying a different angle, now that they know their first attempts didn't work on you the way they expected."

 

"Either way, we can't trust her," says Langly. "Not yet. We need to know more first." Mulder agrees.

 

"What we really need," says Frohike, "is to find out what made them decide to do this _now_."

 

"No, what we really need is to find Scully and get her back from whoever's got her," Mulder insists.

 

"I know, Mulder, and we will," Frohike promises. "But if you can remember what was going on right before all this happened, maybe finding out the 'why' will lead to the 'where.'" 

 

"I can't deny the logic, guys," says Mulder, "but I can't force the memories to come, either. So unless you guys have got some kind of an antidote for these drugs...." The Gunmen grin at him. "You do, don't you?" They nod. "Do I even want to know how you've managed that?"

 

"No, and we wouldn't tell you even if you did," says Frohike. "The few sources we have left are way too valuable to risk. The important part is, we've got the antidote, and we've got enough of it for you and two other people."

 

"So everyone else they've drugged is just gonna go right on thinking Scully's been dead for years?" Mulder asks. He has no idea how many people whoever took her has gotten to, but they've managed to hit Bill and his family, not to mention the entire staff of the FBI, so clearly, their reach is relatively broad.

 

"Nah, eventually the drugs will wear off on their own," says Langly. "And the effects of the bugs wear off even quicker, 'cause they're stuck in devices that most people can't go more than ten minutes away from. When's the last time you went longer than an hour without looking at a computer, a phone, or a TV?"

 

"The longer you go without using a screen that's been tampered with, the less hold they have on you," says Byers. "You've made great progress after just twenty-four hours, haven't you?"

 

"So we save the antidote for people whose help we need right now," says Mulder. The others nod in agreement. "Skinner, then. We need to take care of Skinner. He's got access I don't, and that could be useful."

 

"Definitely," agrees Frohike. "What about the other dose?"

 

"Not Bill," says Mulder. "If we can deal with his electronics, we can wait for the drugs to wear off on their own. He won't be much help. Besides," he sighs, "I'm kinda enjoying him not hating me, for once."

 

"Should we save the last dose?" suggests Byers. "In case we get Scully back and she's been exposed to the same drugs as you?"

 

"I think that sounds like the best idea," says Mulder. He stands up. "So... should we get right to it?"

 

"You want the antidote?" asks Frohike.

 

"Yes. We need to get started right away. Dose me up, and then we'll go grab Skinner somehow and take care of him."

 

"We've been told," says Byers, "that the antidote will knock you out when you take it, at least for a short period of time."

 

"Oh." Mulder frowns. "And you couldn't have... I dunno, injected me with it while I was asleep last night?"

 

"We kinda figured you'd had your fill of being drugged without your consent, man," Langly protests. "We figured we'd give you the choice this time."

 

"Fine," says Mulder, and rolls up his sleeve. "I've already got your supremely uncomfortable couch right here waiting for me. Let's get this over with."

 

\------------------------------

 

_"I still don't get why you won't let me take you to dinner tonight," Mulder sighs, leaning against the kitchen counter. "We should be celebrating tonight."_

 

 _"We still have no way to test it." Scully's staring down at the kitchen table with her arms crossed tightly over her chest. "It's not like we've got a plethora of willing subjects available, and I am_ not _doing this to someone without their consent."_

 

_"I know, Scully," says Mulder, coming up behind her and massaging her shoulders. "But tell me, honestly: is there any reason you know of, any reason you can think of, that's going to keep this from working?" She shakes her head. "So why can't we celebrate?"_

 

 _"Because it's precisely what we_ don't _know, what we_ can't _think of, that keeps things like this from working the way we anticipate," says Scully stubbornly. "Until we have a real, live test subject, and until we have results that can be reproduced, celebrating would be premature." Mulder bends over, wrapping his arms around her from behind and squeezing her against his chest._

 

 _"So we'll figure it out," he promises. "But one way or another, Scully... this is the closest we've ever gotten. Can we celebrate_ that, _at least?" She relents, going soft against him._

 

_"Sure, Mulder," she says. "We'll celebrate by getting to bed before one in the morning, for once. How's that sound?"_

 

_"I can't help but notice that you said 'get to bed,' not 'get to sleep,'" Mulder purrs into her neck. "I think that sounds perfect." Scully turns her head and kisses him fiercely._

 

\--------------------------------------

 

A loud pounding on the door jolts Mulder out of his slumber, and he sits bolt upright, looking around in total confusion. The pieces are just starting to fall back into place- he's at the Gunmen's new lair, they're alive, he's been given an antidote- when the pounding booms through the room again.

 

Frohike materializes from a back room, followed by Langly. Byers stands from where he's been sitting on the floor, and as he does, Mulder notices something else: Walter Skinner, stretched out on a sleeping bag on the cement floor, dead to the world.

 

"What the hell?" The others turn to look at him, startled. "What's Skinner doing here?"

 

"We went and got him," says Langly. "Took your truck to the Hoover building, lured him down to the parking garage, gave him the antidote, and brought him back here. Didn't you say to go grab him?"

 

"I meant metaphorically, Langly! I didn't mean you should kidnap him!"

 

"Sorry, Mulder, but we wanted to get him as quickly as possible," says Byers sheepishly. You were right when you said we need to get started right away." Whoever is outside pounds on the door for a third time, and Frohike runs to a video monitor on the wall.

 

"Holy shit," he says. "Mulder, you're gonna want to see this." Moving slowly, feeling like he has a hangover, Mulder gets to his feet and crosses to the monitor.

 

Diana Fowley is standing outside... and she's covered in blood.

 

"How the hell did she even get here?" Frohike asks.

 

"I don't know, but we have to let her in," says Mulder. The others look at him like he's lost his mind. "Guys, she clearly knows that we're in here... and the longer she stands out there looking like that, the more likely it is that some cop on patrol is gonna notice her. I'm not saying we let her leave once she's in here, but if we don't open the door, your new lair is going to end up raided before the day is out."

 

"He's right," sighs Frohike reluctantly. "We gotta let her in." He crosses to the door, throws the many bolts and chains that secure it, and hauls it open. Diana rushes in, looking around at them in near-total panic. When she sees Mulder, she rushes at him, throwing her arms around him."

 

"Fox!" she exclaims. "I couldn't find you anywhere! I went to your house and you were gone... I couldn't go into the office, not like this... so I waited, I waited in the garage and I saw your truck, and-"

 

"You amateurs let someone _follow_ you?" bellows Frohike, rounding on Byers and Langly, who look horrified. "Is it open invitation in here to the whole damn FBI now?"

 

"I was careful," says Diana. "I stayed back. They couldn't have known."

 

"What happened?" Mulder demands. "Whose blood is this?" Diana dissolves into tears at the question. "When you left the cemetery last night, what happened? Where did you go?"

 

"I went home," sobs Diana. "I wanted to see Stephen... what I remembered at the cemetery, it scared me, and I needed reassurance I wasn't losing my mind, and...." She crumples onto the couch. "I told him," she says. "I told him what I'd seen, what I'd remembered... how you've been insisting for days that Agent Scully is still alive... and he got this look on his face, and...." She shakes her head, squeezing her eyes shut. "He _grabbed_ me, Fox, he grabbed me by the arms and started dragging me to the door. Stephen's _never_ touched me like that, not the whole time we've been married!"

 

"What did he say, Diana?" asks Mulder, his blood going cold. If whoever has Scully knows that Diana is remembering things, knows Mulder is onto them...."

 

"He said the plan was shot to hell, he said he had to take me somewhere. I refused to go with him until he explained, and he... and he....." She's becoming nearly incoherent. "He _hit_ me... and I shot him. I _shot_ him, Fox!" She curls into a ball, rocking back and forth, sobbing loudly.

 

Mulder is aghast. He doesn't know what to think, what to believe. On one hand, it sounds as though Diana has managed to stop her husband- who is obviously a plant- from informing the people he answers to that their plan is in danger. On the other hand... it's looking like maybe, just maybe, Diana is just as much a victim of all this as he is. He crouches down in front of her and takes her hand.

 

"Diana," he says, his voice gentle, "I think something has been done to you to make you remember things that aren't true, and forget what really _has_ happened." She looks up at him, her red face tear-stained and swollen from crying. "But we have a drug here that might help you remember what the truth is." Frohike, Langly, and Byers look at him in shock.

 

"Mulder," says Frohike, "if you give the antidote to her, we won't have any left for Scully."

 

"I know," says Mulder, gritting his teeth. "But think about it, Frohike. Diana might know where Scully is. She might know who's taken her... and I've already remembered the _why._ " The Gunmen's eyes open in collective shock. "Scully and I... for the past five years, we've been working on a vaccine. A combination vaccine that fights both aspects of the black oil virus: the mind control _and_ the gestation. And three days ago, we thought we might have finally gotten the formula right."

 

"And that's why they took her," says Byers slowly. "Why they had to make you forget everything." Mulder nods.

 

"Whether they want the vaccine to keep us from fighting colonization or to use it against the colonizing force themselves, someone has decided we've gotten too close." He looks back at Diana. "The drugs will work their way out of Scully's system without the antidote. We need Diana to remember what she's forgotten _right now._ "

 

"I think he's right," says Byers quietly.

 

"Diana," says Mulder, "we have a shot that we need to give you. It'll knock you out, but when you wake up, we think you'll remember who's done this to you- and why." Diana looks at him with wide, trusting eyes, and nods.

 

"Okay," she whispers. "Give me the shot."


	5. Chapter 5

Skinner wakes up scowling, and he aims his glare straight at Mulder before he's even finished sitting up.

"I don't know what the hell is going on," he growls, "but something tells me it's _your_ fault."

"What gives you that idea, Sir?" asks Mulder innocently. He's not entirely able to suppress a smile.

"Because usually, _everything_ is your fault," Skinner grumbles, rubbing his temples. 

"Not this time," Mulder says. "At least, not entirely. If it were all my fault, there might be an easier fix." Frohike appears with a glass of water, which he hands to Skinner, who regards all three Gunmen warily as he accepts it.

"Forgive me for being rude," says Skinner, "but aren't all three of you supposed to be dead?"

"Rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated," says Frohike, grinning cheerfully.

"Seems to be a lot of that going around," says Skinner. He takes a long drink of water. 

"What do you remember?" asks Mulder.

"I remember... I remember waking up like normal, three days ago," says Skinner. "I felt like shit, but I assumed it was because I hadn't slept well. Because of the storm." Mulder and the Gunmen exchange glances, which Skinner, busy with his water, doesn't see. "I went to work... and it was a completely normal day, right up until you showed up in my office."

"So the first time you saw Agent Fowley...."

"She came into my office an hour later," says Skinner. "She wanted to talk about the report on the case in Iowa the two of you had investigated last...." Skinner trails off, frowning. "No, that's not right," he says. "Agent Scully is the one who investigated the case in Iowa with you. Diana Fowley should be _dead_."

"Sorry to disappoint," says a muddled voice from the couch, and everyone whirls to face Diana. She hasn't opened her eyes yet, but she's already massaging her forehead, doubtless trying to rid herself of the same headache that Mulder and Skinner had both woken up with. As everyone whirls to face her, she pushes herself slowly to a sitting position. Byers disappears for a moment and reappears with another glass of water, handing it to her. She drinks gratefully.

"Can someone _please_ tell me what the hell is happening here?" Skinner pleads. Mulder and the Gunmen look at each other, unsure of where to begin.

"You were telling us what you remembered, Sir," Mulder says. "How about you finish, and then we'll explain?" He turns a somewhat colder eye on Diana, who shrinks back. "And then I'd be very, very interested to hear what _you've_ got to say."

"It's not much more than what I already told you," says Skinner. "Agent Fowley walked into my office, and it was like she'd been there all along... like she'd been almost exactly where Scully's been." He frowns deeply. "It feels like someone's layered false memories right on top of the real ones. I remember the cases you and Scully worked over the years, all the times you've been in my office for a dressing-down...." He looks at Diana. "But I can see _you_ in those memories, too. Like it keeps switching back and forth." He goes suddenly pale. "And I can see Mulder, clear as day, crying in my office because Scully-" He looks around in panic. "It's not true, is it? Where _is_ she?"

"We don't know," says Mulder. "But we sure as hell know she wasn't killed by Duane Barry in 1994." Skinner's expression clears somewhat.

"No, I remember that now," he says. "She disappeared, but she showed up in the hospital. He never shot her." He frowns. "That still doesn't explain where she is now, though." He looks at Diana. "Or what you have to do with this whole thing."

"I'd like to know that, myself," says Mulder. Diana swallows hard.

"I'm not... I'm not completely certain," she says.

"That's bullshit," Mulder asserts. "You said yourself, you remember watching your own funeral. Your _staged_ funeral. And CGB Spender had something to do with it. I know he's dead, so tell me: who's behind all of this now? Who took Scully and tried to plant you in her place?"

"I don't know," Diana insists tearfully. "I remember before the funeral, I remember giving Agent Scully what she needed to rescue you from the DOD, and I remember going back to my apartment and packing my things."

"You hadn't packed beforehand? Really?" Mulder's hesitant to believe that Diana, who, as long as he's known her, has never done anything spur-of-the-moment, had not had her bags waiting in the car when she'd slipped her keycard under Scully's door.

"I hadn't _planned_ to do it," she admits shamefacedly. "I'd told myself all sorts of things about how you were being sacrificed for the greater good, about how one man's life was a small price to pay... but in the end... I couldn't go through with it. Agent Scully had told me to ask myself whether or not you would have done everything possible to save me, if our positions had been reversed... and I knew the answer, without even having to think about it. And I knew I had to do the same for you." Tears spill down over her cheeks. "But I knew they would come for me, the moment they found out... and they did. I didn't have enough time to escape."

"But they didn't shoot you," says Mulder. "They didn't kill you in retribution, the way I was told they did."

"No, they didn't," Diana agrees, shaking her head sadly. "But I'm starting to wish that they had. They took me to Spender, who allowed me to witness my own funeral. It was the two of us and two of his hired goons in the back of a limo, parked on the edge of the cemetery like we were just part of another funeral procession. As we were leaving, I asked him what they were going to do to me, and he told me nothing. He said they'd probably think of an appropriate use for me eventually... and then one of his men lunged across the limo and injected me with something... and that's the last thing I remember until a week ago."

"What happened last week?" Mulder asks.

"I woke up like someone had flicked a switch," says Diana. "I was sitting in a room full of men I'd never seen before- not that I remember, anyway. They told me they represented Spender's interests, and that, at long last, a use had been found for me." Skinner scoffs.

"You expect us to believe that you've, what, been kept in suspended animation somewhere for the past twenty years?" he demands. "Spare me, please."

"I don't think that's the only option," Byers suggests, speaking for the first time. "These people have clearly demonstrated that they have access to devices and substances that can completely control thoughts and memories. I don't think it's completely outside the realm of possibility for them to have placed Agent Fowley in a position where she could be of use to them, performing menial tasks or something similar, until the time came for them to place her somewhere more beneficial."

"And completely wipe her memory afterwards?" says Skinner dubiously.

"They've done it to Agent Scully before," says Langly with a shrug. "Her abduction? Ruskin Dam? Like Byers said, they've definitely got the capability."

"One way or another, I promise you, I have no memory of where I've been since that moment in the car," she says. "I have memories- _years_ of memories- but they begin with the memory of coming back to work with Fox again, after Agent Scully's death, so I know they can't be true." Suddenly, Diana looks dismayed, horrified, even. "I remember...."

"What?" asks Mulder anxiously. "What do you remember?" His heart is in his throat: is she remembering seeing something happen to Scully?

"Stephen," Diana manages tearfully. "I remember meeting Stephen. I remember _you_ introducing us, Fox, right after I came back to work with you."

"It never happened, Diana," says Mulder. "I have no idea who the man you killed last night was, but he wasn't anyone I knew and he definitely wasn't someone you met through me."

"I know that, Fox," says Diana. "I know the memories are false... but they're still there, and they're strong. They're _powerful_. I remember our wedding, our honeymoon, our...." She drops her face to her hands, momentarily overcome. " _Rachel_. I remember giving birth to her, the feel of her in my arms, watching her take her first steps... her first day of school...." She lets out a strangled sob. "Fox, it _has_ to be real! I can remember everything about being her mother!" For a moment, Mulder genuinely feels sorry for her. He knows what it is to be a father who has held his son once before having him taken away forever. He knows what it is to imagine all of the moments that she's describing, and he suspects it's not much easier to remember those moments and know they've never happened.

"I'm sorry, Diana," he says. "But the timeline doesn't work out. You know it doesn't."

"It has to," she protests feebly.

"How old is Rachel now?" Mulder asks. "Out of high school, right?"

"Graduated two years ago," Diana says. "She's a sophomore at Georgetown. She's twenty years old." Mulder shakes his head sadly.

"Which means she would have been born in 1997," he says. "You know where you were in 1997, Diana, and you weren't married _or_ pregnant."

"But I can _see_ her," says Diana. "I can see her perfectly. How can a fake memory be this clear? And if she's not my daughter, then who is she?"

"Probably a plant, the same as the man you shot," says Frohike. "My guess is, they found a woman in their ranks who looked young enough and similar enough to you, and then found a man who had at least some of the same facial features. They might even be under someone else's control, just like Scully probably was when she left your house."

"There's only one way to find out," says Langly. "We need to find this 'Rachel' and question her." Diana looks dismayed.

"You're talking about kidnapping her, aren't you?" she asks. "I can't do that. She's my-"

"She is _not_ your daughter, Diana," says Mulder firmly. "I don't know who she is, but she's no relation to you. And she may well be the best chance we have to find out where they've taken Scully."

"I still don't understand _any_ of this," says Skinner. "How is it that I have two completely different sets of memories? How did they do this to me?"

"Two ways," says Frohike. "The first was an injection of a memory-altering drug, probably administered while you slept three nights ago."

"The night of the storm?" asks Skinner.

"There _was_ no storm," says Frohike. "Mulder remembers a thunderstorm, too, but there was no storm within a hundred miles of Washington that night."

"And the second way?" In answer, Frohike reaches into his pocket and pulls out a phone in a plain, black case. "Wait a minute, is that...." Skinner checks his pockets. "That's my phone!"

"Observe," says Frohike. He pulls the phone out of its case and, over Skinner's protests, smashes it against the concrete floor. From the ruined interior, he retrieves a small, electronic device identical to the one from Mulder's work-issued phone. "Every time you've even looked at your phone over the past three days, this has been re-programming your memories. There'll be another in your home and work computers, your TV, anything with a screen."

"This is science fiction," protests Skinner.

" _You_ explain it, then," says Langly.

"How about the rest of the FBI, then?" Skinner demands. "Hundreds of employees are in the Hoover building on any given day. You're really gonna tell me they _all_ got middle-of-the-night injections and mind-control devices in all their electronics?"

"Probably not," says Frohike.

"Then how the hell do you explain none of them batting an eye when Agent Fowley waltzed into the FBI despite being dead since 1999?"

"It's likely that _some_ of them have been drugged," says Byers. "And there's every possibility that we'll find that some have coincidentally been issued new phones or laptops very recently. We suspect that if we were to look at every employee at FBI headquarters who has been working there since 1999, we would find that all of them experienced an unexplained malfunction in their cell phone or computer, prompting them to requisition a replacement- which was issued to them carrying one of these devices."

"And everyone else?" asks Skinner.

"Nobody else would _need_ much coercion to accept Agent Fowley's presence," says Frohike. "Think about it. How many people who work in that building now were there twenty years ago? You've got new people coming and going all the time. Most of the people who were there back then have either retired, quit, or moved up to higher-ranking positions in field offices."

"And out of the ones who're left, how many would've seen Fowley often enough that they'd recognize her now and know she shouldn't be there?" interjects Langly. "Nah, they probably held back the heavy drugs for the people closest to Mulder and Scully."

"So me, Skinner, Diana, Scully's brother, and his family," says Mulder, and the Gunmen nod.

"And with you, Mulder, even all of that wasn't enough to make you forget that Scully was still alive," says Frohike. Mulder can feel Diana looking at him, but he refuses to meet her gaze, or to feel guilty. She's already admitted that she knew how he felt about Scully. And until he's certain that she's played no active role in this entire mess, his sympathy for her is likely to remain limited.

"As for the rest of the Bureau, or at least the people who work in the Hoover building," says Langly, "they'd only need a little gentle persuasion to convince them not to pay any attention to the unexplained appearance of a new employee that all the old-timers seem to know by name. They wouldn't even need their fancy bugs for that. All they'd need would be a nice little virus, uploaded to the central servers and distributed to every computer and smartphone in the building."

"Let me guess," says Mulder, grinning. "You've already found it, right?"

"And disabled it in five minutes flat," says Frohike proudly. "We gotta admit, we were expecting a little more of a challenge, what with how sophisticated all their other gadgets were."

"Guess they didn't count on anyone being able to hack into the FBI mainframe," says Langly.

"No, they probably didn't," Skinner agrees, though he looks decidedly less comfortable with the idea.

"That's just because they didn't know you three were still out there keeping an eye on things," says Mulder. "If they'd known, I'm sure they would've been more careful." He glances over at Diana. "So that just leaves Bill Scully and his family... and honestly, I think it's better their memories stay altered until this is all over. If Bill knows his sister's still alive but missing, he's only gonna get in the way."

"Our next order of business, then," says Frohike, "is to get our hands on this 'Rachel' and find out what she knows." As one, all five men turn to Diana.

"Fox, I can't do this," she pleads. "Please don't make me. I don't think I _can_. You're asking me to hurt someone that... I know she's not my daughter, but you have to understand, Fox, I don't think I can just turn these memories off. I know they're not real, but they don't _feel_ that way."

"We're not going to hurt her, Diana," Mulder promises. "We _can't_ hurt her. She may be the only path we have to Scully; we need her alive and able to talk."

"And after?" Diana asks. "When you've gotten what you need?"

"She goes to prison, probably," Mulder admits. "But she'll be alive, Diana. And every second we delay, it becomes less likely they keep her wherever they've got her." He crosses to the sofa, crouching down in front of her. "How do we get to her, Diana?" She looks down at her hands, and he takes he chin and forces her to look at him. "Diana, it was Scully who drove me to your funeral when I couldn't get there myself. She admired you for giving your life to help her rescue me. Help me show her that her admiration wasn't misplaced." Diana closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, calming herself.

"All right," she says.

 

\----------------

 

The hardest part of the entire plan, it turns out, is waiting for them back at Diana's townhouse. Stephen's body is still lying where she had left it the previous night, which gives Mulder hope, both that Diana is telling the truth about not having been a willing part of this plan, and that whoever Stephen had been reporting back to doesn't yet know what's happened. It also means, however, that they have to move the body elsewhere before it starts to smell in earnest, which is not a pleasant task. They decide, for the time being, to wrap it in several tarps they find in the garage and place it in the bed of Mulder's pickup, which they park in the garage with the door closed. They drag a throw rug to cover the bloodstain on the carpet and scrub as much blood as they can from the wall behind where Stephen had been standing, and spray so much air freshener around the house, Mulder starts feeling lightheaded.

"Rachel lives on campus during the week, but she comes home after her last class on Friday," says Diana. She glances at her watch. "Which should be within the hour."

"How do you know?" asks Langly skeptically. "Last Friday, none of you lived in this house. What makes you think she's gonna stick to this imaginary timetable?"

"Whoever they are, they implanted this memory in my brain for a reason," Diana shoots back. "They caused me to expect her home by dinnertime on Friday. Why would they do that if they don't plan on her being here?"

And so, they wait. It grates on Mulder, having to sit idle even for an hour, waiting on an uncertain source of information instead of getting out there and finding Scully. He paces nervously, reminding himself over and over again that there's nothing else he can do right now, that he must force himself to wait and be patient. He knows he's not alone in his anxiety: the Gunmen are huddled in the corner of the kitchen, doing their best to keep quiet, but none of them can stop fidgeting, not even Byers. Skinner is just out of sight in the home office off of the front hall, ready to block the front door the moment Rachel is safely inside. In the living room at the front of the townhouse, Diana is sitting on the couch with a book, trying to present as normal a picture as possible for when her "daughter" arrives, but Mulder can feel the tension flowing off of her.

Just after five, Mulder hears a car pull up out front, its engine shutting off, followed by the slam of a car door. He slips quietly into the kitchen, drawing his gun, just as the front door is thrown open. There are footsteps down the front hall, and a youthful voice calling out, "Mom?" Even though he knows all his memories of this voice are false, it still stirs something inside of Mulder. He knows Diana must be feeling it far more strongly; they will need to act quickly.

"Mom, you home?" calls the voice.

"In here, Rachel," comes Diana's response, and to her credit, her voice doesn't shake at all. The footsteps grow louder as Rachel enters the living room.

"Hey, Mom," she says, and as he hears the unmistakeable sound of a cheek being kissed, he feels a tug of unwelcome sympathy for Diana. He thinks of William as he'd looked less than forty-eight hours ago. "Where's Dad?"

"He ran to the store to pick up a few things for dinner," Diana says.

"Mom, you okay?" Rachel asks. "You look a little pale."

"I'm fine, Honey," says Diana, and now her voice _is_ beginning to shake. Mulder signals to the Gunmen, who get quietly to their feet. Mulder holds up one hand, indicating that they should wait a moment. He steps slowly through the kitchen doorway, and at the sound of his entrance, the young woman standing in the middle of the living room whirls to face him.

He has to hand it to whoever selected this woman for this job: she really does look a lot like a younger Diana, like Diana had looked back when Mulder had first met her. The woman smiles at him, and Mulder is suddenly hit hard with years' worth of false memories: a baby held in his arms at a christening, a little girl toddling around holding tightly to his fingers at her first birthday party, a child sitting next to him at a Yankees game, grinning around a mouthful of hot dog, a teenager learning to drive.... he doesn't know how Diana is getting through this.

"Uncle Fox!" she exclaims. "Are you eating dinner with us?" He opens his mouth to answer, but he can't quite find the words. Behind Rachel, he sees Diana getting to her feet. Mulder has the momentary impulse to smile, to nod, to call the whole thing off and say that yes, he _is_ here for dinner, to simply eat, leave, and find a different way to figure out where Scully is being held, because there's no way he can even threaten harm to her with all of these incredibly vivid memories crowding into his head.

Then the Gunmen enter the room behind him, and the mask slips- just for an instant, but it's enough. The split second of horrified panic that flits across "Rachel's" face is sufficient to dispel the illusion, to chase the false memories from Mulder's brain like scattering leaves.

"Are you... are you friends of Uncle Fox's?" Rachel asks, and Frohike gives a short, mirthless laugh.

"Oh yeah, we're friends," he says. "But 'Fox' here sure ain't your uncle." Rachel's composure is fading fast.

"I... I don't know what you mean," she protests in a small voice. Mulder can tell that, while she's probably older than the age of twenty that she's pretending to be, it's probably not by much. She's very young. In all probability, this is her first assignment of any sort. She may well have been sold on the ideal that she's serving a larger cause, saving the world undercover.

"Rachel," he says, keeping his voice calm, almost gentle, "why don't you being by telling us your real name?" She's inches from panic, he can tell, but she's doing her best to hold it together.

"My real name?" She laughs nervously. "I don't understand." She turns to Diana. "Mom, what's going on? Who are these people?" Diana looks ready to crack, but she soldiers on.

"I'm not your mother," says Diana, her voice shaking. "I don't... I don't have a daughter. I was working for the FBI's counterterrorism unit in Europe in 1997. Not married. Not pregnant."

"We know you're working undercover for someone," says Mulder. "Let me guess: you were recruited straight out of Quantico, told you'd been selected for a special assignment, right? They probably gave you a very earnest pitch about how the entire world is under threat from forces you can't possibly understand. They made you feel unique, like you and you alone could help them fight back."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Rachel insists, but she's shaking from head to toe.

"But now your cover's been blown," Mulder continues. "It wasn't your fault, but still, it's happened. And Rachel, or whatever your name is, I promise you this: I know these people. I know what they do with the people they no longer find useful. But I can also promise you this: if you cooperate with us, and tell us what we need to know, we can protect you. We can hide you so that they'll never find you."

It's almost anti-climactic, how quickly she folds. The girl bursts into terrified tears and sinks down onto the sofa. Diana puts an arm around her without hesitation, rubbing her back comfortingly.

"They told me they needed my help," the girl sobs. "They said they had someone that they needed to protect and hide away, and that they needed someone who looked just like me to help them." She looks up at Mulder. "It was just like you said. They made me feel important, like they were this secret army protecting the world from evil, and only I could help." Mulder crouches down in front of her and takes her hand.

"What's your real name?" he asks softly.

"Amanda," she says.

"Amanda," says Mulder, "I want you to listen closely. The people who asked you to do this have kidnapped someone. They've taken her hostage and have gone to great lengths to make sure that no one is looking for her. And if you yourself don't know where they're keeping her- which I would have no trouble believing if you don't- there's a pretty good chance you can point me to someone who _does_ know. One way or another, Amanda, we need to get to her quickly. We don't want to give them any time to think something's up- they might panic and move her." He gives her hand a squeeze. "Can you help us?"

"Who are you looking for?" Amanda asks.

"Her name is Dana Scully," says Mulder. "If you've seen her, you'll remember, even if you never heard her name. She's got-"

"Red hair," says Amanda, and Mulder's heartbeat quickens. 

"That's right," Mulder says. "Do you know who I'm talking about?"

"I... I do," she says, frowning in confusion. "But they didn't... they didn't _kidnap_ her. She's the one I was talking about before, the one they asked me to help protect because she had to go into hiding." The room is suddenly very still around him. It feels as though everyone is holding their collective breath.

"But you know where she is?" Mulder presses.

"I do," says Amanda. "I've seen her. I've been there all week, in fact." It's all Mulder can do to keep from jumping up and running out the door, dragging the frightened girl along with him.

"She's okay?" he asks. "She's safe?"

"Yeah, she is," says Amanda. "But you don't understand. She wasn't kidnapped. She isn't being _held_. She's free to leave anytime she wants."


	6. Chapter 6

Mulder feels as though he's been swiftly transported right back to square one, with the whiplash to prove it.

Was Scully compelled against her will to get out of bed, inject Mulder with a memory-altering drug, and drive her car to an undisclosed location? Or did she leave of her own free will? Has she decided that she's had enough, that she's finally through following him through the dark on an unlit path? It makes sense to him that, if Scully were ever to leave him for good, she would see the attraction in making him forget her all together, knowing that otherwise, he would stop at nothing to get her back.

His heart tells him no. His heart insists that Scully would never do this to him, that she would never abandon him like this. Her strict moral code would simply never allow her to lie to him like this, much less to drug him and toy with his memories against his will. She knows firsthand what it's like to be left unable to trust her own recollections, and in his heart, he strongly believes she would never put someone else through that. Certainly not him.

But the darker part of his mind- the part that once kept him locked in a dark house, alone, for over a year, while his world had collapsed around him and Scully had temporarily fled in search of light and sanity- whispers malevolently to him that maybe, just maybe, this was the only way out that she could think of. The most diseased parts of his psyche hiss at him that his obsessive behavior has finally gotten to be too much for her, and that the only way she could truly escape his orbit entirely.

The Gunmen remind him, again and again, to reserve judgement, to wait until Scully is standing in front of them before coming to any conclusions. After all, between the drugs, the electronic memory re-programming devices, and the chip in her neck, whoever has Scully has more means at their disposal to control her than they'd had to control him.

But it's hard, so hard, with Amanda insisting that Scully is free to leave anytime she wishes, to keep an open mind.

At the very least, they now have an address. They're piled into the Gunmen's replacement for their beloved Volkswagen bus, a plain white panel van that, Langly laments repeatedly, lacks the character of their old vehicle. It has the advantage, however, of being unobtrusive and easily-forgettable- not to mention the fact that it seats all seven of them comfortably.

They're driving north, to an address on the outskirts of Washington, which, Amanda has told them, is a three-story medical office building. She's agreed to go with them, if only to prove to them that Scully is not being held against her will. Her keycard will get them into the building- though, she's warned them, she doesn't have access to the higher-security areas, and it's likely that those areas are precisely where Scully is the most likely to be found.

"Is there some sort of intercom system?" Skinner asks, as they hurtle northwards on the interstate. "Can you page her and get her to come to a more accessible place?"

"Preferably somewhere private," Byers puts in. "We don't know what Agent Scully's reaction is going to be, one way or the other. We don't want to draw attention to ourselves."

"I don't see how we're going to avoid attention," grumbles Skinner. "Anyone connected to a project like this is going to know what Mulder looks like. Chances are, they've been warned that he might show up. And there's every possibility that they know what I look like, as well."

"What if we could get her to come outside, somehow?" Frohike suggests. "Get her to come really close to the van? Maybe we could-"

"What, grab her and kidnap her back?" Mulder scoffs. "I'm not taking Scully against her will. Not if there's a chance she really _wants_ to be there."

"You don't really believe that," says Frohike quietly. "Scully wouldn't leave you."

"She left once before," Mulder says, before he can stop himself, before he can shut that part of himself up.

"Not for good," says Skinner. "Once you got your head out of your ass, she came back."

"Not completely," Mulder says. And suddenly, he finds himself voicing his darkest fear. "What if she's finally had enough?" He swallows, ashamed to feel tears stinging his eyes. "What if this was the only way out that she could see?"

The silence that follows is tense, uncomfortable... until it's broken by the last person Mulder would have expected.

"Scully once took on a hospital full of doctors when she thought you were in danger," Diana suddenly pipes up from the back of the van. "She flew to Africa on the slightest chance that she could find a cure for you there. She took _me_ on, in the hallway of the Hoover building, when she thought that I knew where you'd been taken. She went toe-to-toe against the men who murdered her sister for you and barely batted an eye." Diana shakes her head and looks out the window, her expression dark. "Somehow I don't think she's suddenly decided _now_ that she wants to get away from you."

"She's right, Mulder," says Skinner. "You're talking about a woman who helped break you out of a military prison and went on the run with you. If that didn't drive her away, a few months partnered back up with you at the Bureau isn't going to scare her off. Not Scully. Not ever."

He wants so badly to believe them, but it's hard, so hard, when all he can see in his mind is her face the day she'd finally decided that she couldn't take any more, that she had to leave him, at least for a while. "For your own good, Mulder," she'd said, tears spilling down her cheeks. "I can't always be a crutch for you to lean on. You've got to learn to stand on your own."

And he had... eventually. He'd made the appointments, he'd gotten himself to all of them, he'd mulled over his dark and difficult past with the most understanding therapists he could find, he'd accepted the prescriptions, he'd taken the medications, and bit by bit, he'd pulled himself back above the surface.

And finally, she'd come back. Not entirely- she still has the apartment in DC- but the lease is up in three months, and it had seemed to Mulder as though it had been understood that she wouldn't be renewing it.

"So what do we do?" asks Diana, breaking through his reverie. She looks to Amanda. "Does Scully stay at this office building full-time?"

"I think so," Amanda says. "There are apartments in the building, for the scientists that are there every day. So they can keep an eye on test subjects overnight, you know?"

"So if we can find her apartment, and get inside somehow," says Mulder, "we can wait for her."

"And then what?" asks Langly. "We don't have any of the antidote to give her. How do we convince her to go anywhere with us?" 

"We're going to have to make it up as we go along," says Mulder. 

"Great," says Langly. "Just like old times."

 

\---------------------

 

At nine o'clock on a Friday night, the parking lot in front of the building is nearly deserted. Several white vans are positioned not far from the front entrance, distinguishable from the one they're driving only by a pharmaceutical logo painted on the sides. Langly pulls their van up alongside them and kills the engine, then turns to look at the others.

"Now what?" he asks. Mulder turns to Amanda.

"Tell me what the security situation is like," he says.

"There's a night guard," she says. "He mans a desk off the front lobby. Makes periodic walking rounds."

"That's _it_?" Mulder asks. He finds this tough to believe; in his experience, men like this prefer beefed-up security. As a matter of fact, in his experience, labs like this tend to be located in secret military bases, not in suburban medical office buildings. But Amanda is nodding.

"Nobody is here by force, Agent Mulder," she says. "The employees come and go as they please."

"And what about keeping other people out?"

"Like who?" Amanda asks. "People don't know this is anything other than an ordinary office building. It's not listed as government property. There's almost no reason anyone would come poking around." She quirks an eyebrow at him. "Except for you, apparently."

"Think about it, Fox," says Diana. "This building is unobtrusive, easy to overlook. Heavy security- patrolling guards, fences, lots of cameras- is only going to make passers-by wonder what's going on in here."

"I guess that works in our favor, at least," Mulder sighs. "That, and, they don't know to expect us." He looks pointedly at Amanda. "Do they? Are they expecting any sort of status update from you?"

"Not tonight," she says. "As far as they know, everything is normal."

"Good," says Mulder. "So... who goes in, and who stays with the van?"

"All three of us need to go in," says Frohike, indicating himself and the other two Gunmen. "We've got some big plans for their mainframe, if we can access it." Mulder whips his head around to stare at Frohike.

"You never mentioned anything about that," he says accusingly.

"Think about it, Mulder," Frohike says. "Once you've got Scully, we need these people disabled as much as possible if we wanna keep them from coming right back after her, am I right?" Mulder has to concede that this makes sense.

"I have to go in, obviously," says Amanda, though she looks terrified at the prospect. "I'm the only one who's actually _supposed_ to be here. And you'll need my keycard to get through the front door, not to mention operate the elevators."

"I think I should stay with the van," says Skinner. "If things go south, I'm the one with the best access to backup." Mulder nods his agreement, then turns to Diana.

"And you?" he asks. Diana looks as though she'd like nothing better than to simply throw open the door of the van and take off into the night, but she steels herself, swallowing hard.

"Going with you," she says. "You may need backup, and it sounds like those three-" she indicates the Gunmen- "are going to have their hands full."

"How's Scully going to react to you being there?" Skinner asks.

"That's going to depend," says Mulder, "on what they've made her remember. Or forget." He clenches his jaw. "If they've done anything to her memory at all."

 

\-----------------

 

Mulder has to admit to himself that, out of all the times he's broken in somewhere, either alone or with Scully, he's never before employed a tactic as straightforward as simply strolling up to the door. But now, that's exactly what he finds himself doing. Granted, it's a rear entrance, not the front door that Amanda is currently using, but still... it seems like total madness. The plan is, they'll wait here, off to the side and out of sight of the camera aimed at the back door, and wait while Amanda lets herself in the front, using her keycard. She'll tell the guard that there's a strange vehicle parked outside (in the opposite side of the lot from the van) to get him away from his bank of monitors, and as soon as he's out the door, she'll come and let them in.

It all goes off without a hitch, and in seconds, Mulder, Diana, the Gunmen, and their tote bag full of computer equipment are standing in an empty hallway with Amanda, less then a hundred feet from where, she's told them, there are a handful of small apartments- and one of them, she promises Mulder, should contain Scully.

Mulder focuses on this... and not on what happens after.

"Okay, Mulder, this is where we leave you," says Frohike. "Our target's in the basement." From the depths of the tote bag he pulls out a radio and hands it to Mulder, who raises his eyebrows.

"Melvin, I've got my cell phone," he says. "Can't you just call me if something goes wrong?"

"Call me old-fashioned, Mulder," Frohike responds. "This is quicker. Tell me when you've got her and you're heading back out to the van." He pats Mulder on the shoulder. "Good luck," he says, and seconds later, he and the Gunmen have disappeared down a stairwell. With a deep breath, Mulder turns back to Amanda.

"Lead the way," he says.

After nearly four days of nearly non-stop panic and terror, he's standing here, at a plain, unassuming door, empty save for a small sign reading "Dr. Dana Scully." As frightened as he is, Mulder can't help but chuckle to himself. He reaches out and slides the sign carefully from its metal holder, tucking it into his pocket.

"What are you doing?" Diana whispers, frowning.

"Scully will understand," he says. "At least, I hope she will." He looks at Amanda. "Ready when you are."

He doesn't breathe as Amanda knocks; he simply steps off to one side, and Diana stands behind him, so that when the door is opened, they won't be visible from inside the apartment. At first, there's silence, and Mulder begins to panic. What if she's _not_ here? By now the security guard is most likely seated in front of his monitors; they can't wander the building trying to figure out where she is. And what if she's not in this building at all? 

Amanda knocks again, a little louder this time, and Mulder's heart stops all together as he hears, from within, the one voice he knows better than any other.

"Just a second!" Scully shouts, and moments later, the door opens. "Amanda! I didn't think you were supposed to be here tonight!"

They don't give her any longer than that. Amanda pushes into the apartment, and Mulder and Diana quickly follow, slamming the door behind them. Mulder throws the lock and turns....

...and sees Scully frozen in shock, staring at him with a look of abject horror on her face. She backs slowly away until she hits the wall of her living room.

"No," she rasps, her voice weak. "You can't... you're not... this is impossible."

"Scully," says Mulder, his voice calm, gentle. He can scarcely remember the last time he's seen her this terrified. "It's me, Scully." She shakes her head violently, covering her eyes.

"No, no, no no no...." She looks up at him. "You're not real," she says, as though trying to convince herself. "You're dead, Mulder. You're _dead_." 

"Of course I'm not dead, Scully," he says. He wants desperately to rush at her, to take her in his arms and crush her against his chest, but he doesn't dare touch her, doesn't even dare to move closer when she's so obviously frightened.

"Yes, you are," Scully wails. "You've been dead for _years_. Robert Patrick Modell forced you to shoot yourself in 1996. I was there. I _saw_ it happen... I tried to stop it...." She turns to Amanda. "Whoever this man has told you he is, he's lying," she says. "He's impersonating someone who's been dead for twenty years."

And that's it: the confirmation Mulder needs. In spite of the horror he knows Scully is feeling, in spite of the pain he knows the false memory of his death must be causing her, more than anything else, he feels the most tremendous sense of relief.

She hasn't left him. She didn't go of her own free will. Whatever reasons she has for staying here, it's not because she's hiding from him. He could nearly weep from the joy of it.

"Scully," he says, "I promise you, it's me. Someone's done something to you to make you think that I'm dead, that I've been dead for a long time. They tried to do the same thing to me- they tried to make _me_ think that _you_ had died, on Skyland Mountain in 1994." She's squeezing her eyes shut and shaking her head again, as though she can will him to disappear. "It's all a trick, Scully. They've drugged you, just like they drugged me." Scully looks to Amanda again.

"I don't know why you've brought him here," she says, "but I want security up here to arrest him _now_."

"He's telling the truth, Dr. Scully," says Amanda. "I don't know if they've drugged you, but I do know they were drugging Agent Mulder. And Agent Fowley, too." Scully notices Diana for the first time, but there's not even a glimmer of recognition.

"Who are you?" she demands, and Diana laughs humorlessly.

"They must have _really_ upped her dosage, if she's not trying to kill me on sight," she mutters.

"I lied to you, Dr. Scully," says Amanda. "I'm not a graduate student doing an internship here. I've been hired to pose as this woman's daughter, and she's been planted in your office at the FBI to take your place."

"I haven't had an office at the FBI for a very long time," Scully insists. "This is madness."

"How long have you been working here?" Mulder asks, seeing an easy hole to punch in the story that's been implanted in Scully's head.

"Over ten years," she says. "Since I left the Bureau."

"I'm sorry, Dr. Scully, but that's not true," says Amanda. "You've been here less than a week. I was told that you were in hiding, that you were trying to get away from the people that you worked with. That's why I was hired- to help keep up your replacement's cover story." Scully looks from Amanda, to Mulder, to Diana, and back to Mulder in confusion.

"Scully, please," he begs. "It's really me. I promise you it is." She searches his eyes, still pressed up against the wall, leaning on it as though she might collapse without its support. Mulder's about to try approaching her again, when suddenly, the radio on his belt crackles.

"Mulder, come in." Frohike's voice is mildly panicked. Mulder grabs the radio and depresses the "speak" button.

"I'm here, Melvin," he says. "What's going on?"

"You find her yet?" There's a good deal of crashing and swearing in the background.

"Yeah, we've found Scully," Mulder says. "What's all that noise?"

"You're gonna wanna grab her and get outta here, pronto," says Frohike, over the sounds of Byers and Langly yelling at each other. "Some of the labs are right next to the server room, and it turns out that some of the shit they're storing here is... uh... flammable." More shouting, and a loud crash.

"Melvin," says Mulder, "are you telling me the building's on fire?"

"That's exactly what I'm telling you, Mulder," Frohike says. "We're making for the van before the fire alarm goes off. I suggest you do the same." The radio goes silent, and Mulder turns back to face the others, dismayed.

"There's a fire?" Scully asks, stepping away from the wall for the first time. "In one of the labs?"

"Sounds like it," says Mulder. Scully looks panicked.

"Then we need to get out," she says. " _Now._ There are large quantities of highly combustible substances in those labs, and if they ignite, the entire building could explode." The question of Mulder's identity forgotten, she rushes to the door and unlocks it. Mulder follows her out, the others behind him. In the hallway, Scully stops just long enough to pull the fire alarm, and Mulder can't help it: he laughs. As they rush to the exit, Scully gives him a queer look.

"What's so funny?" she demands, and her dubious expression is so familiar, so beloved he could almost cry. "There are other people working here tonight. They need to get out, too."

"It's not funny, not really," Mulder yells over the noise of the alarm. "It's just... that's how you saved me from Modell. You pulled the fire alarm. You broke his concentration, broke his hold over me." For the space of a heartbeat, there's a flicker of recognition... and then she shakes her head, and it's gone.

"We need to go out the back door again," Amanda yells, pulling ahead of them. "For all we know, someone in the front could recognize Agent Mulder." Mulder nods his assent, and the four of them barrel down the hallway and back out the entrance they'd used on the way in. They run full-out to the van, and as they approach, Mulder sees the side door standing open, the Gunmen already inside waiting. Beside him, Scully freezes in her tracks.

"Wait a moment," she says, staring at the Gunmen. All three grin sheepishly at her.

"Hey, Scully," says Frohike, waving from the seat where he's been securing his bag of computer equipment.

"What are you three doing here?" The three men exchange grins.

"Nice to see _some_ one who doesn't think we've come back from the dead," quips Langly.

"We're here to help rescue you, of course," says Byers. There's a noise from out of sight, and Skinner pokes his head out of the van. Scully yelps in surprise.

"If we're going, we need to go _now_ ," says Skinner. Looking behind the van, Mulder can see more cars pulling into the parking lot. Skinner is right- they need to move."

"Scully," he says, turning to face her, "if you don't believe it's really me, if you don't trust me... you can trust Skinner, right? You can trust the guys?" She looks at the four other men, who nod at her encouragingly. "And they're telling you we gotta go. Please, listen to them, Scully. Let us get you out of here. Sooner or later the drugs they have you on are gonna wear off, and when they do, everything's going to make sense."

"I somehow doubt that very much," Scully says... but she sighs, and climbs into the van.

Mulder nearly sobs with relief.

The door is slammed, Skinner leaps behind the wheel, and in seconds, they're tearing out of the parking lot.

Before they're even a mile down the road, a massive fireball blooms on the horizon as the building explodes.

 

\------------------

 

It's been two days.

Two long, agonizing days of pacing around the farmhouse, waiting. Scully has consented to come back to the house to wait for the drugs to wear off, under the condition that the Gunmen come, too, as well as Amanda, and that Skinner comes in the evenings when he's finished at the Bureau. Diana is here, too, but her presence seems to agitate Scully- most likely because she's the one person whom Scully can't place at all in her memory as living _or_ dead- so she stays mostly out of sight.

"I'm thinking it may be time for me to move on," she confesses to Mulder as they sit out on the porch as the second full day of waiting is drawing to a close. "We have no idea how much the loss of that building hurt these people. We don't even know who these people _are_ , not really. The only thing we can guarantee is that if there are any of them left, they're going to be looking for me." She sighs. "I need to get the largest head start that I can. And anyway," she glances back at the house, "I don't really want to be here when Scully gets her memory back. I don't think she'd be that happy to see me."

"She might, Diana," says Mulder. "She never did get to thank you for helping her save me from Spender." He smiles at her. " _I_ never got to thank you." Diana shrugs, embarrassed.

"It was the right thing to do," she says. 

"So was helping me get Scully back," he says. "I owe you for that, as well."

"No, you don't," Diana protests.

"I owe you my help, at least," he insists. "The Gunmen and I can help you disappear." He smiles at her sadly. "I'd ask you to keep in touch, but... it doesn't really seem like the best idea."

"No," murmurs Diana. "Probably not." They embrace, just once, as old friends, and in spite of everything, Mulder feels more at peace with their past than he ever has before.

She leaves before sunrise the next morning, and to Mulder's surprise, Amanda goes with her. It's a wise choice for both of them, he thinks- Diana will help protect the younger girl, and she'll keep Diana from being lonely. They leave equipped with a full set of forged documents, courtesy of the Gunmen, and enough money to get them far away, courtesy of Mulder.

He would have given them his truck, but it's still in the garage of a DC townhouse, and by now, it's probably smelling pretty bad.

 

\--------------------

 

Five days gone.

Scully is upset most of the time now. She's accepted that her memories have been tampered with, finally- Skinner's and the Gunmen's reassurances failed to convince her, but when her brother Bill had called, panicking because he'd arrived back on his base in Germany and suddenly realized that he'd been hallucinating for over a week that his sister had been dead since 1994, she'd finally believed.

She can't quite bring herself to accept Mulder. She claims to understand that it's really him, that he's alive, that she'd stopped Modell from making him kill himself all those years ago... but in the total absence of the memories of their life together, she has no idea what to say to him. She often finds it difficult to be in the same room as him.

"They must have given her a much stronger dose than the one you got," Frohike hypothesizes. "I'm betting they got her where they wanted her, and she tried to leave and get back to you right away... so they dosed her until she stopped trying. They probably would've done the same to you, if they'd found out that the drugs and the electronic bugs weren't working the way they were supposed to."

"Let's give it a few more days," Langly suggests, and Mulder agrees.

It's not like they have much of a choice.

 

\----------------------

 

A week.

Scully seems to spend most of her time in tears. She says that she can almost sense the memories she's missing, that she can feel them like a gaping void inside of her. She still has all the false recollections, but now that she _knows_ that they're false, they've taken on a sinister quality in her mind. Skinner sits with her most of the time. He tries to tell her stories of the years she's spent by Mulder's side, but it frustrates her too much when none of it is familiar, and finally, he gives up.

The Gunmen have tried to get in contact with their source, to see if they can obtain one last dose of the antidote, but whoever the man is, he seems to have gone to ground. Mulder isn't surprised by this: the destruction of their base is likely to have thrown the entire operation into chaos, and there's every chance the source no longer has access to the antidote. For all they know, all existing doses may have burned along with the building

"I think there's another possibility that we need to acknowledge," says Byers quietly on the eighth day.

"What's that?" asks Langly. But Mulder already knows. He's been thinking about it for days and it's been making him almost constantly sick to his stomach.

"The chip," he says dully. "In her neck." Frohike grimaces.

"You think they used _that_ to alter her memories?" he asks.

"It makes sense," says Mulder. "If the medication and the bugs didn't work, they might have activated something in the chip, as well."

"In which case the only way to reverse the damage would be to-"

" _No_ ," says Mulder. "That's out of the question." Byers looks pained.

"We should at least ask her, Mulder," he says. "She's suffering right now. You know she is. We can always keep the chip and put it back in if-"

"I said _NO_ ," Mulder repeats.

"You're talking about the chip in the back of my neck? The one I had after I came back? After I... disappeared?" The four of them whirl around. Scully and Skinner are standing together in the doorway.

"You know about the chip?" Mulder asks. He can't quite put his finger on when she'd initially had her doctor remove it, but he's pretty sure it had been prior to the incident with Modell. Scully nods.

"It showed up on a scan, not long before you...." Her voice trails off.

"Before the time they made you think I'd died," Mulder says encouragingly. 

"My doctor asked if I wanted him to remove it, and I told him not to," she continues. The men exchange glances. "Is that not right?"

"You _did_ have him remove it," says Mulder. "The one that's in your neck now isn't the same one you had when you were returned."

"So why don't we try taking it out?" she asks. "Like Byers suggested? We can take it out and see if-"

"When you took it out before, Scully," Mulder says, his voice strained, "you developed terminal cancer." She looks stricken. "A brain tumor. You nearly _died_. The only thing that saved your life was putting another chip in the first one's place." He shakes his head sadly. "I'm sorry, Scully. It's just not worth the risk." Tears well up in Scully's eyes.

"Please," she says. "I feel like I'm losing my mind. Like half my life has been stolen from me, and I'm never getting it back. I'll do anything to make this feeling go away. I don't care what happens next."

"Give me one more week, Scully," Mulder pleads. "Just wait one more week."

 

\-------------------

 

It's a last-ditch effort.

Mulder has promised Scully: if what he has in mind doesn't work, they'll remove the chip from her neck and allow whatever's going to happen, happen. She's hesitant about the trip- especially given that he won't tell her where they're going. She's even more upset that he won't let Skinner or the Gunmen come with them.

"This is for us, and us alone, Scully," is all the explanation he'll provide.

He would have liked to drive the whole way, in hopes that the long hours in the car might jog something in her memory, but it hasn't gotten any easier for her to be in close quarters with him, and so they fly, and rent a car from the airport. Mulder spends the entire trip trying desperately not to think about what will happen if this doesn't work. He tries to focus, instead, on what he’s got planned for when she does get her memories back.

Before they’d destroyed the computer mainframe, the Gunmen had managed to upload a significant amount of data onto one of their portable hard drives. They’d discovered, in studying it, that the vaccine that Mulder and Scully had, after her arrival at their headquarters, been tested on human subjects, and had been found to be effective in every case.  
If this works... they can get started on making as many doses of the vaccine as possible. Just in case.

But it's been two and a half weeks, and for the past five days, Scully has been totally listless, lying in bed almost constantly, barely eating.

He can't stand to see her like this. It's killing him as surely as the loss of her memories is killing her.

And so, once again, Mulder finds himself driving along Nolan Avenue in the tiny town of Kaycee, Wyoming, heading for the Invasion Bar and Cafe. But this time, Scully is in the passenger seat next to him, gazing out of the window, not speaking, most likely trying very hard to make herself forget that he's even there.

It's almost four in the afternoon when Mulder pulls into the parking lot. Unlike before, he doesn't go into the restaurant. Instead, he leads Scully to the bench on the front porch and sits back, watching the road. Eventually, Scully turns to look at him.

"What are we doing here?" she asks, her voice flat.

"Waiting," he says.

"For what?"

"For the one thing I can think of that might jog your memory," he says. "The one thing that I honestly think they could never completely erase, no matter what they did to you."

"And what's that?" she asks, sounding as though she honestly couldn't care less. In answer, Mulder nods at the road behind her.

"Here he comes now," he says.

The boys look much the same as they'd looked when Mulder had seen them last, almost a month ago. They're laughing as they cross the parking lot to the restaurant, and this time, they're toting baseball equipment. Mulder can't help but grin at the sight of his son- _their_ son- tossing a ball in the air as he walks, catching it in a well-worn mitt. He glances down at Scully, his heart in his throat.

She's zeroed in on him instantly. Somehow, he'd known she would. She stares at William, her mouth open, her blue eyes- exactly the same as his- suddenly full of tears. The boys draw level with them and incline their heads politely, displaying their small-town midwestern manners, and then they've passed, filing into the restaurant. The door swings shut behind them... and the silence they leave behind is deafening.

It's shattered, however, when Scully abruptly breaks into the most violent sobbing he's ever seen from her. She buries her face in her hands, rocking herself back and forth on the wooden bench, shaking with the force of her tears. Mulder is hesitant to touch her, unsure of how she'll react... but when he carefully lays his hand on her shoulder, she turns and throws herself into his arms, clawing desperately at his neck and burying her face in his chest. He crushes her to him, just as he'd longed to do the moment he'd rushed into her apartment in the medical building and had seen her, and he's not surprised to find that he's sobbing, as well.

When their tears have died down, when they can both breathe again, when Mulder's certain the owner of the restaurant is probably two seconds from calling the police to report the insane out-of-town couple crying on their porch, Scully draws back enough to look up at Mulder. Her eyes are full of a boundless joy.

"Mulder," she says, her voice hoarse, " _I remember._ "


End file.
